Re-Imagining BME Education

Duke BME is invested in the success of everyone in our community. Our vision is to prepare our undergraduate, master’s, and PhD students to thrive, whether they choose to stay in academia or pursue opportunities in industry.

Character, Ethics, Leadership, and Professional Skills

When biomedical engineers conduct research, invent devices or systems, and launch entrepreneurial efforts, the results directly affect people; this is a particularly intimate impact that we are honored and humbled to provide. Our department is committed to educating students to serve as informed leaders with high standards of character and ethics in decision-making.

Engineering with character

Cameron Kim leads a lesson in his bioethics course

Four students pose in a lab with a white prototype of a their low-cost tympanometer device — The mHealth team poses with a prototype of their device

Integration of Engineering Design and Manufacturing

Students must deftly integrate both theoretical knowledge and creative, rigorous, practical applications as they develop solutions to complex, relevant problems. We envision training that extends seamlessly from design, to prototyping, to fabrication. Our department will integrate engineering design and contextualized problem-based learning at all levels of our undergraduate and graduate curriculum.

According to the World Health Organization, nearly 60 percent of hearing loss in children is preventable with proper screening, but screening tools are often expensive and difficult to access. To address this issue, audiologists, clinicians, and a team of BME Design Fellows designed a low-cost and easy-to-use tympanometer that could be paired with a Bluetooth phone to identify signs of inner-ear damage in children.

Preventing childhood hearing loss worldwide

Teaching Paradigms Adopt Cutting-Edge Tools

Local and global health disparities present an urgent societal need. We will expand our efforts to meet these health disparities with tools that are continuously re-imagined, redesigned, and retested to operate in specific resource-limited environments. These challenges create opportunities for us to lead and innovate with partners who share that vision.

Duke BME faculty like Daniel Reker are working to integrate emerging technologies such as LLMs into their research enterprises, using their predictive power to quickly design and identify potential biologics, protein configurations, nanoparticle delivery designs, and more. These forward-looking research approaches provide our students with numerous opportunities to use and explore the capabilities of new technologies.

Reker lab

Daniel Reker with student researchers in his lab — Images of Daniel Reker’s lab taken on January 27, 2026 in Wilkinson.

students work on a medical device prototype in a BME class

Approaches That Acknowledge and Benefit From the Breadth of Our Student Experiences

Student perspectives are shaped by a range of prior academic and social experiences before arriving and while at Duke, which motivates us to evolve toward providing a more personalized learning experience. We aspire to take these individual differences into account when setting prerequisites for classes; developing our syllabi, lectures, courses, and graduate-level certificate tracks; and in the personal and professional mentoring of our students.

Turning classroom lessons into real-world impact

Industry-Focused Curricular Paths

Increasingly, industry opportunities are in medical devices, biotechnology, computational domains, and other emerging specialties. This commitment to industry-focused curricular paths and research thrusts underscores our mission to prepare our students to thrive in diverse post-graduation career paths. Staying nimble by continuously re-assessing our degree programs and training opportunities will ensure that our students are readily employable as thought leaders.

Building a curriculum that provides students with real-world design challenges from real-world clients gives our students a wealth of experience that prepares them for a wide range of career opportunities after graduation. Ann Saterbak is the architect of our signature First-Year Design experience, which allows every one of our students to begin this journey from their first day on campus.

First-Year Design