Duke BME Magazine

Dear Colleagues and Friends,

Good work is rarely accomplished alone. For me, the 2019 Engineering Biology for Medicine conference served as an energizing reminder that breakthrough discoveries often emerge due to collaborations at the intersection of engineering, biology and medicine.

It was wonderful to welcome colleagues from schools as far-flung as Berkeley, Chicago, Columbia, Cornell, Georgia Tech, Harvard, Hopkins, MIT, UCSF, Yale, and ETH Zurich to Duke BME for the May 2019 conference, which was co-sponsored by Nature Medicine and Nature Biomedical Engineering.

With sessions covering topics that spanned mechanobiology, synthetic and systems biology and immune engineering, this event was a wonderful opportunity for leading researchers to highlight successful research, and discuss how their work could solve long-standing problems within the biomedical field.

I was thrilled to have several Duke BME faculty among the speakers presenting their own work and introducing sessions. In our newest issue of the Duke BME Magazine, we take a deeper look at their impressive research, with stories about researchers using lab-on-a-chip technologies to study diverse diseases, work in the emerging field of mechanobiology, novel approaches to mapping the human brain, and features about work at the intersection of tissue engineering and regenerative medicine.

Our faculty are just one of the reasons Duke BME is consistently ranked among the best biomedical engineering programs in the United States, and I’m thrilled with the opportunity to highlight what is just a small fraction of their excellent research. Duke BME has blazed an exciting trail in the last fifty years, and I know there is more innovative work on the horizon.