Biomedical Engineering in Nature"Nature", one of the most popular journals amoung scientists, in the Issue published on September 18, 2003 (NATURE, VOL 425, http://www.nature.com/nature), has brought three interesting articles on Biomedical Engineering:
"Biomedicine meets engineering" In the first article, Virginia Gewin addresses the labour market in the USA, in particular the job oportunities for biomedical engineers: "Job prospects are bright in biomedical engineering (BME), which combines engineering design skills with biological expertise, and students are flocking to enter the field. According to the US Department of Labor, the number of BME jobs in the United States is expected to increase by 31.4% during the next seven years, more than double the average predicted rate in other fields. Opportunities are arising on several fronts. The recently established National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) is generating training and research schemes. New university departments are forming and are recruiting researchers to train the on slaught of applicants. And the biomedical industry's interest in engineering is growing". A key quality of a successful biomedical engineer is the ability to understand and communicate both engineering and medical jargon. Research and education are well founded in the USA. NIBIB was set up in 2001 and already boasts a $280-million budget. The bioengineering consortium BECON coordinates $900-million worth of research and training opportunities throughout the NIH. "The total number of undergraduate BME programmes has doubled in the past five years. Experts anticipate that the number of accredited departments will also increase - from 24 to 50 in the short term", she sais. Ralf Jox writes on recent development of BME in Europe. He spoke to Joachim Nagel, IFMBE President and the head of the BME department at the University of Stuttgart in Germany. The creation of the European Alliance for Medical and Biological Engineering and Science (EAMBES) is a start of a better organised and more harmonised approach to BME research and training in Europe. Jox continues summarising his converstion with leading experts on BME in Europe: "This umbrella organization brings together numerous national scientific societies and academic institutions, with the goal of promoting medical and biological engineering at European and national levels. Nagel has compiled for EAMBES profiles of BME courses offered at more than 200 universities in 28 European countries. His goal is to create a Europeanwide accreditation system so courses in different countries can be both comparable and competitive. Academic training of biomedical engineers in Europe has long been regarded as a postgraduate specialism. But this is changing with the recognition that the next wave of pioneers must get an early start, says Jos Vander Sloten, a bioengineer at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium, and secretary-general of EAMBES."For young scientists to succeed in this field, the best way is to combine biology and engineering science right from the beginning of their studies," he says. In 1997, Eindhoven and Maastricht universities in the Netherlands established undergraduate BME courses. Other universities throughout Europe are now following their lead. Some of the first students to take those programmes are now into graduate work - and leaving some of their mentors behind. "They are so well trained that some professors find it hard to grasp what their research is about," says Fons Sauren, a biomedical engineer who oversees the University of Eindhoven's BME programme. PhD programmes and postgraduate masters courses are also proliferating." Prospects are good for biomedical engineers across industry - and there's still room for entrepreneurs, say Ralf Jox and Virginia Gewin in "Engineering your own path". They cite Jaakko Malmivuo from Tampere University of Technology in Finland who found in his survey about career paths of biomedical engineers that "Eighty per cent of our graduates from 1979 to 1997 were employed in full-time jobs, and one-third moved quickly to managerial positions". Commenting again the state of art of BME in USA, they say that "although jobs in the US biomedical industry have historically been in larger firms such as Medtronic or Baxter, the growth in industrial posts is likely to come predominantly from smaller spin-offs. Indeed, entrepreneurial fever has hit the US biomedical-engineering community". The full text of these articles can be found at the Nature web site, http://www.nature.com/nature
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