With the addition of the new division, the research and academic programs in biomedical engineering will be greatly expanded. New areas under development include cellular and molecular mechanics, biological and medical imaging and biological microsystems. Also, an undergraduate program in biomedical engineering will be administered by the new division. By 2006, the division expects to have 14 full-time faculty members and to be housed in the planned Genomics and Biomedical Sciences Building. An application to advance the division to department status will be filed this year.
Biomedical engineering is the application of engineering principles to medical problems.
UC Davis is particularly well suited for teaching and research in the field, with so many related programs right at hand, including the schools of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine , the Center for Comparative Medicine , UC Davis Medical Center , extensive programs in the life sciences and, of course, the College of Engineering . We have the opportunity to build a leading program. Ferrara earned her doctorate in electrical engineering here in 1989. She was a faculty member at California State University, Sacramento, Cornell University and the University of Virginia before she returned to UC Davis last summer. Ferrara's laboratory investigates new methods to map blood flow and is primarily supported by the National Institutes of Health.