A Word from the Department Chair, Dr. Ghadiali

Time and Change ….. Biomedical engineering (BME) has a strong history at The Ohio State University being established as a program within the Electrical Engineering department in the early 1970s, integrating with the growing medical center in the 1990s and being formed as a department in the mid 2000s. Similar to the growth of our discipline nationwide, BME at Ohio State has grown dramatically in the past 10 years and we now graduate ~75 seniors per year, have strong MS, PhD and MD/PhD graduate programs and have grown to 25 full time equivalent faculty members. Biomedical engineering is now one of the most popular majors on campus with faculty and students conducting cutting edge research that is having significant impacts on human health. As we grow, the department is very focused on 1) providing a very high quality of education/training, 2) conducting cutting-edge research that improves human health and 30 conducting outreach activities that improve access for our constituents. We have restructured our advisory board and are lucky to have a very engaged group of distinguished alumni advising the department. In this newsletter, we highlight the achievements of one of our alumni, Duran Yetkinler who also serves as a member on the BME External Advisory Council.

We are also extremely excited about the pending opening of The Mars G. Fontana Laboratories, the new home for Biomedical Engineering on the main engineering campus in summer 2020. This facility will not only provide a home to our nationally recognized undergraduate program but will provide a central location for the multi-disciplinary research activities of our faculty. Here we highlight a few examples including associate professor Katelyn Swindle-Reilly’s work in biomaterials and drug delivery for ocular disorders and Drs. Purmessur and Higuita-Castro’s work using cell-based therapies to alleviate low back pain.

I am also very excited to announce the arrival of two new outstanding faculty members, Dr. Aleksander Skardal and Dr. Seth Weinberg, who are both bringing highly innovative research programs to our department in the areas of cancer engineering and computational biomedical engineering. Finally, we are lucky to have some of the best students on campus who are passionate about using their engineering skills to improve human health and giving back to their community via important outreach activities. The number of activities conducted by the BMES undergraduate student society at Ohio State is truly amazing and I was lucky to be present when they were awarded the Outstanding Chapter of the Year Award at this year’s annual Biomedical Engineering Societies meeting in Philadelphia.

To celebrate our successes, we are planning 10 and 50 year reunions in 2020 and we are looking forward to honoring our past which has laid the foundation for a very exciting future! For our alumni, we would love to reconnect with you at this event or anytime you are on campus. Please feel free to connect with us by emailing BME_buckeyenews@osu.edu to let us know newsworthy events or plans for being on campus.

Thank you for taking the time to read about the exciting development in BME at Ohio State.