I'm Meghan Vidt and I'm an assistant professor in biomedical engineering in
the Penn State College of Engineering. Biomedical engineering
integrates classical and modern engineering principles with the life
sciences and healthcare to define and solve problems in biology, medicine,
healthcare, and other related fields. Biomedical engineering students complete
coursework in areas such as: instrumentation, biomechanics, numerical
simulations, advanced mathematics, and physiology. Biomedical engineers work in
a variety of fields in the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries including
medical device development, diagnostic and therapeutic tool design,
physiological system modeling, and the practice of medicine. Penn State
biomedical engineering alumni are building next-generation artificial
hearts and medical implants, designing improved medical imaging devices, and
creating better methods of drug delivery. They work in industry, medical
organizations, and academia. Many have gone on to graduate or medical school.
Penn State's department of biomedical engineering is housed in the new
chemical and biomedical engineering building, featuring one hundred nine
thousand square feet of state-of-the-art lab space with leading-edge
instrumentation and computing resources and a variety of collaborative learning
spaces and classrooms for students. Biomedical engineering faculty are
actively working with industry in the Penn State College of Medicine to
advance biomedical research and improve health care while also translating this
expertise directly into the classroom to benefit our students. Biomedical
engineers are only limited by the extent of their imagination. At Penn State BME,
we develop problem solvers who are driven to develop novel, innovative
healthcare solutions that impact millions of people. It was while I was
here, on a tour of the pre-medicine department, that I started inquiring
about some of these things, like at one point in your medical career, do you
start to investigate how to make new things or how to make surgeries better
how to do drug delivery or how to improve just patient care and they said,
"You know we don't really do that here, go talk to the engineers," so I came back and
toured the biomedical engineering department here and fell in love with
what I saw. Well, medicine is absolutely necessary
for taking care of the whole person and that human interaction. Engineers are the
ones who move medicine forward, who develop the new technologies. Honestly, I
really do love biomedical engineering. I think the thing that I love about it
most is that it provides a lot of freedoms for the students in it. There
are four distinct and really cool options in biomedical engineering:
biochemical, biomechanical, biomaterial, and imaging. All of them offer a
different flavor and a lot of cool unique courses that people in that
specific branch can take. I love the fact that it's a mixture of the other majors,
in a way, because we take the same core courses like thermodynamics, fluids,
mechanics, so we get those courses from other engineering disciplines. We also
learn computer science languages, so it's a mixture of everything, but it's just a
specific application to medicine, which is what I'm passionate about. So, the
field that I'm in right now is assistive technology and one of the coolest things
that's happening right now is BCI or brain computer interface. So, being able
to control a computer without having to use, you know, your fingers or things like
EMG, which is like muscle twitching but actually, being able to real-time control
computer. So, you think right away, "Okay, you know, what can that be used for? Maybe
a really cool video game," but for people that, you know, are paraplegics that have
disabilities they can use that to communicate to go to school. One of the
things that I think is most interesting is our ability to use materials and
drugs to engineer responses from the immune system. We sometimes want to
suppress the immune system if we want to transplant some materials or we want
to stop an allergic reaction for instance. But in other cases, we want to
encourage the immune system to attack something, like in the case of cancer. All
of these areas biomedical engineers can contribute to quite effectively and so
it really is very exciting. We all know someone who has cancer, who
has dementia, who has other diseases and the nice thing about biomedical
engineering is we aim to solve this, whether it be someone you know or so
many friends now that research does go into impacting people's lives. I hope to
be able to find ways to make new products, new designs, new methodologies
that can help individuals, one by one, on a daily basis.
That's what biomedical engineering is to me, that's what the field of medicine is
to me, that's what all of engineering is to me, and that's really what I want to
do for someone else. On a daily basis I get to see a spark that gets ignited
that gets students invigorated about the topics that they're studying and
engaging with their coursework. We are Penn State Biomedical Engineering and we
are impacting our world.