University of Virginia

Biomedical engineers create new methods to explore life and treat disease. It is not too much to say that modern medicine was invented by biomedical engineers. Virtually every piece of equipment that physicians use to diagnose and treat disease was invented by a biomedical engineer—whether it is an MRI or a pacemaker or a robotic surgery system. In each case, biomedical engineers combined their knowledge of human physiology and tools from a spectrum of engineering disciplines to solve a particular clinical problem.

Thanks to advances in computation and data science, biomedical engineers have taken on even more ambitious challenges. Biomedical engineers are not only creating smart devices, but they are using tools like machine learning and modeling to accelerate the pace of medical discovery, to lay the foundations for precision medicine, and even to engineer new tissue and organs.