Designing a Career in Biomedical Engineering

By Elisabeth Pain

June 11, 2010

Biomedical engineering combines engineering techniques with human biology to develop medical technologies. Research in the field has focused on prosthetic limbs, hip and knee replacement devices, rehabilitation technologies, assistive technologies such as hearing aids, medical imaging technologies, and biomedical instrumentation. As biomedical devices get more sophisticated, biomedical engineers must draw on more and more disciplines. One problem with traditional hip implants is that over time they can loosen or cause bone damage by wear and tear, causing pain and requiring repeat surgeries. New devices include a network of sensors and actuators placed on the implant during surgery. Controlled wirelessly, the device will allow physicians to monitor the bone-implant interface after surgery while stimulating bone growth. Developing the device has required the collaboration of mechanical engineers, physicists, biologists, and clinicians, Clara Frias the designer says.

Other biomedical engineers are developing a new generation of prosthetic limbs that amputees can control with neurosensors, with assists from computer science, neuroscience, and electrical and mechanical engineering, among other disciplines. One example is Al?cia Casals, a professor at the Technical University of Catalonia and head of the Robotics group at the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia in Barcelona, who works with a type of robotic prosthetics known as exoskeletons. The exoskeletons are placed on missing or dysfunctional limbs, where they sense patients' will to move and assist them in doing so to help patients train their muscles (and related brain regions) during rehabilitation. An engineer and computer scientist by training, Casals is developing software to make these robotic exoskeletons "intelligent enough to interact with humans and try to complement the humans' abilities," she says. Other biomedical engineers work in cellular, tissue, and genetic engineering and develop artificial organs and biomaterials. Engineering principles are relevant to the understanding of how the tissue will work in vivo or how the machine we use to grow the tissues works in bioreactors.

The body of scientific knowledge and skills needed to work in biomedical engineering is just as diverse as the range of research topics. "Anyone can enter because the field is so wide," Casals says, noting that the field benefits when people enter it from different directions. Nowadays, many universities offer bachelor's, master's, and Ph.D. programs in biomedical engineering, but some experts suggest that, on the contrary, medical and biological engineering should be "seen as a sort of specialization that occurs after you have a solid education in physics and engineering," Viceconti says. No matter how you get in, the most important skill is "to be open to ... working in different fields," Casals says.

Working with scientists in and out of your lab is especially important, Frias says, which places great demands on communication skills. "The other communities have a different language and different ways of thinking, different ways of doing [things], and it's really difficult," Casals says. Also important is a holistic, patient-focused approach -- even if biomedical engineers rarely work directly with patients. "Don't think only about the software, only about the machine, only about the specific facts, but just on the whole system," Casals says.

The chief advantage of biomedical engineering is also its main disadvantage: It sits at the intersection of several disciplines. If you are a biomedical engineer developing scaffolds to grow cartilage for regenerative medicine, you are unlikely to publish in top biology journals because your research is not viewed as fundamental, Viceconti says. It may even be difficult to get such work into traditional engineering journals, because "still today there is a resistance in the traditional engineering community to consider this as part of engineering," though that is changing, he says.

On the other hand, "it is unquestionable that the funding opportunities, the career opportunities are much [greater] in these interdisciplinary areas than in the more established and traditional areas," Viceconti continues. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projected a growth of more than 70% over 10 years in the number of biomedical engineering positions -- up from 16,000 in 2008. In Europe, new centers such as the Institute of Biomedical Engineering at Imperial College London and the Institute of Biomedical Engineering (IBME) at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom provide a multidisciplinary environment in which scientists, engineers, and clinicians can work together to apply scientific advances to health care. "You have to fight and work well to get funds and to get jobs, but it's a promising ... and expanding area," Casals says.

Training in biomedical engineering provides options beyond the academic world, too. Opportunities are growing for biomedical engineers in industrial research, and biomedical engineers are increasingly finding jobs in hospitals, where they oversee the acquisition, safety, and maintenance of medical technologies, Viceconti says. And "if ... you undertake a research career and then after a while you realize for some reason this is not what you want, well, you're still an engineer, so you have a lot of industrial opportunities for redesigning your career path."

Source: Science Magazine, Elisabeth Pain, 6/11/10