Bioengineering center establishes first industrial partnership

The Center for Bioengineering Educational Technologies has signed National Instruments as its first industrial partner.

The new center, headquartered at Vanderbilt University, was established by the National Science Foundation last October as a national engineering research center. Its purpose is to develop innovative and effective education and training programs in the rapidly growing field of bioengineering. It is made up of participants from departments of biomedical engineering and education at Vanderbilt, Northwestern University, the University of Texas at Austin and the Harvard/Massachusetts Institute of Technology Division of Health Science and Technology.

National Instruments of Austin, Texas, is a world-recognized leader in computer-based acquisition, digitization and processing of analog data. One of their products, called LabVIEW, is widely used in engineering research, production and education. The partnership agreement allows the center to incorporate LabVIEW software into their educational programs.

"Industrial partners are critical to the success of the center," said Jerry C. Collins, the center's industrial liaison and research associate professor of biomedical engineering at Vanderbilt. "In addition to supporting our research with monetary and in-kind contributions, they provide us with the knowledge about the basic skills that their workers must have. Such information is critical in the design of our programs."

Engineering has long been a partner with medicine in developing medical technology and equipment. As a result, bioengineering is one of the fastest growing fields within engineering. But the courses and educational resources that provide the foundation of physics, mathematics, engineering science and biology that bioengineers need have not kept pace with the field's rapid growth.

"There is a nationwide need to synthesize and integrate the knowledge and develop ways to teach bioengineers to be effective innovators throughout their careers, and that is what the center has been designed to do," said Professor Thomas R. Harris, center director and chair of Vanderbilt's Department of Biomedical Engineering.