The Fischell Department of Bioengineering at the University of Maryland is the home of an emerging academic discipline, exciting interdisciplinary degree programs, and faculty and students who want to make a difference in human health care through education, research, and invention. Health care is changing rapidly, moving toward more technological approaches to diagnosis (such as body scanners and
biosensors), treatment (including targeted therapy, minimally invasive surgery, and implantable devices), personalized and regenerative medicine, and the extensive use of information technology. Biomedical engineering is steadily becoming the world’s largest industrial sector, and as a result, there is an increasing demand both for doctors who are technically competent and for engineers who are properly trained in basic medical science. James Clark School of Engineering's location in a metropolitan area that is home to an expansive number of health care facilities, medical schools, biomedical research centers, and federal regulatory agencies. We have established relationships the National Institutes of Health (including the The National Institute of Biomedical Imaging & Bioengineering and the National Cancer institute), the Institute for Bioscience & Biotechnology Research, the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture; educational institutions such as the University of Maryland Baltimore (UMB) Schools of Medicine, Dentistry, and Pharmacy, as well as other universities locally and nationally. Our growing interdisciplinary faculty is dedicated to expanding our research collaborations. We are also dedicated to the vision of engineering entrepreneurship—getting science out of the lab and into the hands of doctors, care providers and consumers. Our collaboration with Canon U.S. Life Sciences seeks to develop a highly automated system providing rapid infectious disease diagnosis, and we are a founding member of the FDA-funded Maryland Center of Excellence in Regulatory Science and Innovation, which focuses on modernizing and improving the ways drugs and medical devices are reviewed and evaluated. We have a view of the human condition that is unlike many bioengineering and biomedical engineering departments in the country. Our thoughts and ideas are grounded first in biology. Our faculty and students think about biological systems: how they work, how they function, and how they interact with their environments. They think about how nature organizes information and materials into molecules, cells, tissues, organisms and ecosystems that sense and respond to physical and chemical cues. They try to understand processes that go astray, like those involved in disease. Armed with this knowledge, they use engineering principles to develop new technologies and devices that will change lives and improve human health throughout the world.
