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Integrating BioMEMS and Biomedical Microsystems into Electrical Engineering Education: A Three-Year Pilot Study

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Micromachining or microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) technologies are considered an enabling technology having revolutionary impact on many areas of science and engineering. MEMS technologies are now being applied to health monitoring, diagnosis and therapeutic applications, which are frequently referred to as BioMEMS or Biomedical Microsystems. Biomedical Microsystems research includes biological, biomedical, biochemical, and pharmaceutical analysis and synthesis using MEMS-based microsensors and microsystems. At the University of Cincinnati the state-of-the-art emerging MEMS and BioMEMS research was integrated within the graduate and undergraduate electrical engineering curricula. For the past three years a novel course Introduction to Biomedical Microsystems was offered. In these first three course offerings, enrollment has spread beyond the initial target audience of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and now includes students from mechanical engineering, environmental engineering, computer engineering, and biomedical engineering. Course evaluations over the past three years suggest that the course was successful for a number of reasons. The use of research articles to supplement lecture materials worked effectively, providing undergraduate students with a real world perspective. Reading assignments, discussions of research papers, and short quizzes at the beginning of lectures were used to test understanding of concepts. This was also done to ensure that students were not overwhelmed by the multidisciplinary material or the course pace. The results of the three-year pilot program are encouraging, and suggest that the approaches followed in this course could be adapted to introduce engineering students to advanced multidisciplinary research topics from many fields of science and engineering.

Teaching MEMS at the University of Cincinnati

As we enter the 21st century, microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) have had a revolutionary impact on many areas of science and engineering. The application of MEMS technologies in research has already increased the performance of conventional methods in microorganism detection in environmental monitoring, drug discovery in the pharmaceutical industry, and clinical diagnostics. More importantly, it is enabling access to new information and applications on the molecular level.1 The conceptual paper by Manz et al.2 triggered an avalanche of developments and discoveries, which led to an exponential growth of the field.3,4

MEMS technologies are now being applied to health monitoring, diagnosis and therapeutic applications, which are frequently referred to as BioMEMS or Biomedical Microsystems. Biomedical Microsystems research includes biological, biomedical, biochemical, and pharmaceutical analysis and synthesis using MEMS-based microsensors and microsystems. Such devices and systems, having microscale dimensions, tend to behave differently than their macroscale counterparts. The unfamiliar physics involved can require modeling and specialized training. Dozens of universities across the country have recently recruited faculty in the field of

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Papautsky, I., & Peterson, E. (2007, June), Integrating Biomems And Biomedical Microsystems Into Electrical Engineering Education: A Three Year Pilot Study Paper presented at 2007 Annual Conference & Exposition, Honolulu, Hawaii. 10.18260/1-2--2846