Biomedical engineers play a significant role in mapping the human genome, robotics, tissue engineering, and in nanotechnology.
Biomedical engineering has the highest percentage of female students in all of the engineering specialties.
30% of biomedical engineering graduates are employed in manufacturing.
Many biomedical engineering graduates go on to medical school. The percentage of students applying to medical school is as high as 50% in some programs.
There are 15 chapters of the national biomedical engineering honor society, Alpha Eta Mu Beta, located on college campuses throughout the United States.
BMES has more than 132 student chapters on college and university campuses.
Judith A. Resnick, PhD, a U.S. astronaut who died when Challenger exploded in 1986, was a biomedical engineer working at NIH from 1974 to 1977.
Willem Kolff, MD PhD, a biomedical engineer and physician, designed early artificial hearts and the first kidney dialysis machine. He supervised the first implanted artificial heart into Barney Clark, and his latest work is on a portable artificial lung.
The National Institutes of Health has a new institute for biomedical engineering and imaging. The Institute (NIBIB) coordinates with the biomedical imaging and bioengineering programs of other agencies and NIH Institutes to support imaging and engineering research with potential medical applications and facilitates the transfer of such technologies to medical applications.
A single U.S. foundation, the Whitaker Foundation in Arlington, Virginia, has made significant contributions to the development of this profession. Whitaker Foundation grants more than doubled the number of biomedical engineering academic programs in the United States by adding 38 new departments in this field.