Design, Design, and More Design — Biomedical Engineering at UW-Madison
By: Patrick Byrne
An overview of the unique structure of the Biomedical Engineering design curriculum, including an administrator’s and a student’s thoughts on what makes it so special.
For many disciplines of engineering at UW-Madison, senior design classes have a familiar format. Students complete a rigorous capstone project during their final semester, designed to draw on the full body of knowledge they have gained over their college career. However, for students in the biomedical engineering program, capstone design takes a vastly different form.
In the BME program, students begin taking design courses starting in their freshman year. Then during their sophomore year in BME 200 — Biomedical Engineering Design, they select projects that ultimately pair them with teams of juniors in the program. Each team then spends the semester working together on solving their own real-world problem in the field of medicine, such as designing a prosthetic for someone with a specialized medical condition. This mentorship reflects the program’s theme of continuity, despite varying levels of experience. All BME students are in the same design class, and all team projects are drawn from the same pool. Each semester of a BME student’s design track fittingly follows the same format: selection of teams and projects, drafting of potential solutions to a problem, selection of a final design, and development of that design culminating with a formal presentation and a poster exhibition at the semester’s end. The second semester, BME 201 — Biomedical Engineering Fundamentals and Design, is the only one that takes a different shape. Rather than working on their own problem, each team of sophomores works at solving a common problem without the mentorship of junior students. This way, BME students all gain the same standardized set of technical skills and have the opportunity to explore various emphasis areas.
As juniors in BME 300 — Biomedical Engineering Design, students assume the role of mentor and use their experience from BME 201 to guide the selection of their project discipline. From there, they are off to the races. Students will typically work on the same project with the same team members for their last three semesters, certainly for their final two. Over the duration of the design track, their teams become more specialized and their projects more specific, as students gradually home in on the sort of career they want to pursue following graduation.
Dr. John Puccinelli, coordinator and instructor for the program, emphasized that the program’s greatest strength is the way in which its structure aids students in pursuing their passions. “You can learn all the theory you want, but until you get into something that applies it, you don’t necessarily see what it’s good for… It helps them realize, ‘I really like this aspect of the field, so I want to take more classes that are related to it’” says Puccinelli.
“Design isn’t about just knowing one thing. It’s about pulling information from a lot of different subjects into one whole project.” — James Jorgensen
The program facilitates this construct through an incredible amount of faculty involvement. Each team of students is assigned a faculty advisor who has experience in a field related to their project. The teams and advisors meet for at least thirty minutes each week. This leads to a student-faculty ratio of four or five to one — unusual for any course at UW-Madison, let alone one that typically has more than 300 students. As a result, BME students build long-lasting connections with faculty across the program. “I don’t get to know my students that well in any other class,” says Puccinelli, “because I don’t have much meaningful interaction with them beyond maybe office hours.”
According to James Jorgensen, alumnus of the program and current BME graduate student, this faculty involvement contributes to what he sees as the program’s most valuable component: its multidisciplinary nature. “Everyone in the BME department is there to help you, and most of the faculty advisors are your professors in other classes,” says Jorgensen. “You have the opportunity to talk to not only your own faculty advisor, who’s specialized in the area of your project, but also other faculty with different specializations who might be able to offer tips and advice… This is ultimately great for learning, because design isn’t about just knowing one thing. It’s about pulling information from a lot of different subjects into one whole project.”
All told, BME students graduate with six or seven full semesters of rigorous design experience that is directly transferable to the broader field of biomedical engineering — each project comes from a real client with a real health-related need. Projects can stem from proposals from well-known companies such as Boston Scientific, or they can be as specific as addressing a single need of an individual client. “While there are often some more similar types of projects, each one is ultimately unique,” says Puccinelli. Because of the sustained nature of the design program, students get, according to Jorgensen, “that much more tangible experience with the design process, and they are set up much better for success in the future because of it.”
Photography provided by James Jorgensen
