Plans to begin a new Biomedical Engineering Program at the University of Houston cleared one last administrative hurdle recently when the Texas Coordinating Board granted its approval for a new undergraduate program in the field. The program will be launched at the UH Cullen College of Engineering this fall semester.
“This new program is a significant step forward for our university and our neighboring institutions in the Texas Medical Center,” says Raymond Flumerfelt, dean of the Cullen College of Engineering. “The enhanced research efforts will ultimately lead to clinical improvements and reduced costs for our nation’s health care industry.”
The college already has a successful master’s program in biomedical engineering. The new undergraduate program provides UH with an opportunity to build on current ties to the Texas Medical Center and enhance research and internship opportunities for its graduates and students, Flumerfelt says.
The new program will strike a careful balance between the study of life sciences and engineering sciences, creating a new path to graduate level education in a broad range of fields, says Matthew Franchek, director of the new program and chair of the Department of Mechanical Engineering.
“Biomedical Engineering is a technical path, somewhat like pre-med, but it leads to a much broader range of things,” Franchek says. “Our students might go on to graduate school, medical school, or law school. The possibilities are extremely broad, and especially so because of the balanced way we’ve structured our program. That’s what makes us unique.”
The program, which will be housed and administered in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, is already generating excitement and interest among students and faculty at the University of Houston, says Franchek.
“This program is so amazing,” he says. “It’s a tribute to the commitment of the faculty for advancing this knowledge base, this application area. If we don’t have collaborative, sharing responsibility and partnership, if we don’t all see how the good impacts us as a college, as a university, we could never build this program.”
The program will focus on biosensing and bioanalytics, two areas that show promise for delivering new technologies to improve clinical care and dramatically reduce health care expenses, Franchek says. Finding ways to detect, predict and prevent illnesses, especially expensive catastrophic illnesses such as heart attack and stroke, will become increasingly valuable as health care costs continue to mushroom.
Americans spent $1.4 trillion on health care in 2001, which translates into 14.1 percent of the gross domestic product. UH is located near the world’s biggest medical district, the Texas Medical Center, which can serve as fertile ground for collaborations and partnerships in the future, Franchek says.
“We are hitting the national agenda where we should be,” Franchek says.
The program will open to students in Fall 2003, and enrollment will be limited to an elite group of students, which Franchek expects to grow from less than 40 students in the first year to 165 students within five years.
For more information on the new program, contact Charlotte Palm at 713-743-4502.