History of Bioengineering at UC San Diego / IEEE Pulse

Below is a link to an interesting article on the history of our bioengineering department, and some of the current, cutting-edge research happening in the bioengineering labs here at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering. 

Shankar Subramaniam, professor and chair of the Department of Bioengineering, wrote the article, which appeared in IEEE Pulse. 2012 Jul;3(4):49-55.

Article title: Evolution of bioengineering at UCSD: opening new vistas. (subscription required)

The PubMed abstract is here. Not sure if a full open-access PDF will be posted on PubMed, or not. 

First paragraph of the article is below: 

Bioengineering is a young albeit important discipline that is still in the process of evolution. Frequently, insightful and prospective students have asked me two important questions: 1) What is the field of bioengineering and where is it going? 2) Given the diversity of bioengineering and expertise in your department, what is the uniting factor? To answer these, let us ask, what do bio and biomedical engineers do? Engineers measure components of systems with existing techniques or develop new technologies, understand the design principles of the system, develop a quantitative model, and study the behavior of the system through the model by introducing perturbations. Thus, they are able to build similar systems that can provide similar and different input-response characteristics and lead to innovation. Bioengineers apply these principles to living systems. The end goal is societal and economic benefit, which goes beyond merely satisfying intellectual curiosity