BME Expands Connections With Medical School On The Chicago Campus
Collaboration with Feinberg School of Medicine grows with joint appointments, shared research space
Northwestern Engineering’s Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME) and Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine are expanding their collaborations to further translate engineering research into the clinical environment.
With joint appointments in biomedical engineering and the medical school, new Assistant Professors Molly Bright, Laleh Rad, and Zhe Ji are ramping up research and strengthening connections between biomedical engineering and fields like physical therapy, radiology, and pharmacology.Feinberg School of Medicine are expanding their collaborations to further translate engineering research into the clinical environment.
“Joint appointments between radiology and BME have been critical to the growth of research and innovation in our department,” said James Carr, chair of Feinberg’s Department of Radiology.
“Not only do they foster cross-campus collaboration between different schools, but they also provide graduate students unique experiences to work with different groups of researchers.”
The department will continue building on its long-standing relationship with the medical school and the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab. Bright, Rad, and Ji join several BME faculty members with cross-appointments, including Professors Patrick Kiser, Michael Markl, Wendy Murray, Eric Perreault, and Matthew Tresch.
“The Department of Physical Therapy and Human Movement Sciences (PTHMS) at Feinberg is among the most engineering-oriented physical therapy educational and research programs in the nation,” said Julius Dewald, professor of biomedical engineering and professor and chair of PTHMS. “The department has a number of faculty engineers as well as quantitative scientists that have benefited greatly from a growing link with BME.”
Biomedical engineering will further collaborate with medical school colleagues in the new Simpson Querrey Research Building, scheduled to open in summer 2019. The top floor of the building will be devoted to bioengineering and will be the first space dedicated to the biomedical engineering department on Northwestern’s Chicago campus. The building will house the Center for Synthetic Biology, the Center for Bio-Integrated Electronics, and the Simpson-Querrey Institute for BioNanotechnology. The space will facilitate further expansion of BME faculty.