UVA Biomedical Engineering

The BME department at UVA was founded in 1967 as a joint program of the School of Medicine and the School of Engineering and Applied Science. Today there are 26 core BME faculty members and more than 30 joint faculty members from multiple schools and departments. We have a student population of more than 90 graduate students and nearly 300 undergraduate students from across the country and the world. The BME building, built with support from a Whitaker Foundation award, is centrally located in the School of Medicine complex and is adjacent to the University’s Cardiovascular Research Center, the Couric Cancer Center, and the Carter Immunology Center.  Current BME research foci are (a) systems biology, computational modeling and biomedical data science, (b) cell and tissue engineering, and (c) biomedical imaging.  These technologies are often applied to cardiovascular disease, cancer, musculoskeletal disorders, and infectious and neurological diseases.

Biomedical Engineering at UVA is regularly recognized among the top programs in the country for its research, educational, and translational activities. For example, we received a Wallace H. Coulter Foundation Translational Partners Award, one of only nine departments to receive such support across the country. Among our faculty are recipients of many awards, including three recipients of the Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) Rita Schaffer Young Investigator, an NIH New Innovator awardee, an NIH Transformative Research awardee, and two winners of NSF CAREER awards.  Our graduate students are regularly recognized and supported by external NSF and American Heart Association fellowships (6 of each over past 2 years, and 7 NSF honorable mentions). The department is home to an NIH T32 Training grant for graduate students (Transdisciplinary Big Data Science Training at UVA) and an NSF-funded Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) award (Multi-Scale Systems Bioengineering).  In the past, two UVA faculty members were presidents of BMES.