Biomedical Engineering, B.S.

Biomedical engineering (BME) is a multidisciplinary field that applies engineering principles and design methods to improve the interaction and integration of engineering with medicine and biological sciences for improving human health and solving healthcare challenges.

The 4-year Bachelor of Science (BS) in BME undergraduate program is designed for students who aspire to engineer novel treatments, devices, materials, technologies, or processes to improve human healthcare. Students seeking careers in industry, the healthcare professions, government agencies, or graduate studies in BME are candidates for this program.

The curriculum provides students with a unique set of qualitative and quantitative healthcare problem definition, analysis, and solution skills. This program uses the shared freshman-engineering curriculum, and offers students the flexibility to select among a variety of foundational engineering courses beginning in the third semester and a variety of upper-level BME courses in the senior year. A novel 2-semester interdisciplinary Capstone Senior Design project focused on design and engineering solution of a complex system of contemporary interest to biomedical engineers and healthcare professionals completes the curriculum. BME and Product Design courses jointly created by BME and College of Design faculty, are integral to semesters 4 to 8 of the program and are intended to instill “design-thinking” in students.

The curriculum is distinct from other BS BME programs due to these integral design-thinking courses and experiences within the curriculum. These design-thinking experiences balance left-brain oriented technical materials with right-brain creative approaches to cultivate crucial abilities needed to: 1) communicate empathetically with all stakeholders in a design cycle; 2) frame healthcare challenges into engineering problems; and 3) design, prototype, build, test, refine, and implement solutions that solve contemporary healthcare challenges problems and meet all user needs.

Consistent with our Mission Statement, the undergraduate Biomedical Engineering Program at the University of Kentucky strives to produce graduates who will:

1. Utilize their training at the interfaces of engineering, medicine, and design to solve problems related to health and healthcare.
2. Engage in on-going learning, through graduate or professional training, to update their knowledge and advance their skillsets.