Why Penn Bioengineering?
Welcome to Penn, home to one of the oldest and most successful bioengineering departments in the United States. Our undergraduate and graduate programs consistently rate among the top 10 in the country.
Bioengineering capitalizes on Penn’s great institutional strengths, including a compact urban campus of 12 separate schools, geographic proximity linking the engineering and medical schools within one city block, and a collaborative, integrated environment that allows students and faculty to transcend disciplines with curricula, research, technology, and patient care.
Penn offers a broad-based, but focused educational experience. Here we encourage you to explore on your own, even as an undergraduate, and enable you to work with world-class faculty and their research programs.
More than 80 percent of our undergraduates perform independent research (about 20 percent of them publish their findings before they graduate), while our graduate students publish their work in the most prestigious scientific journals.
Our graduates work in a variety of careers, including:
- managing research and development in a biotech company
- evaluating new medical technologies for a venture capital firm
- forming start-up companies
- pursuing academic research and teaching
- becoming physicians (careers in medicine are common but not a majority.)
Our students belong to a vast alumni network across the country at companies, health centers, government agencies, and colleges and universities. We welcome you to learn more about us and to visit us in Skirkanich Hall, the state-of-the-art bioengineering center on campus.
Sincerely,
Ravi Radhakrishnan, Ph.D.
Professor and Chair
Alumni Spotlight
Cynthia Reinhart-King
Cynthia Reinhart-King completed her PhD with Dan Hammer in Bioengineering. She is currently the John W. Cox Professor and Chair of Bioengineering at Rice University. She has held various leadership positions including serving as the President of the Biomedical Engineering Society. Her research program focuses on studying the role of cellular forces and tissue mechanics in the progression of cancer and atherosclerosis.
Andrés García
Andrés García is the Executive Director of the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience and Regents’ Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Dr. García’s research program integrates innovative engineering, materials science, and cell biology concepts and technologies to create cell-instructive biomaterials for regenerative medicine and generate new knowledge in mechanobiology. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Medicine, and the National Academy of Inventors.
Joan Lau
Joan Lau is Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of Spirovant, responsible for the strategic direction and growth of the gene therapy company. She delivers more than 20 years of biopharma leadership experience, including as CEO for several venture-capital-backed biotech companies. As CEO of Spirovant, she has been selected to receive the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year 2020 Award in Greater Philadelphia and was named a Woman of Distinction by the Philadelphia Business Journal. She is also an Associate Course Director and Adjunct Professor in the Roy and Diana Vagelos Program in Life Sciences and Management program at Penn.
Our Expert Faculty
Our faculty members are dedicated to building up the next generation of engineers. In addition to being incredible mentors, they’re leading experts and researchers in their fields.
Signature Courses
Brian Litt, MD, and guest lecturers with “real-world” experience in designing and developing implantable medical devices in research and industry, cover topics from the basics of neurosignals to deep-brain stimulation and antiepileptic devices. Students learn about software, brain-computer interface (BCI) hardware, the regulatory and approval process for devices, and start-up companies and entrepreneurship in BCI from of the field’s pioneers in implantable brain devices. By the end of the course students will be able to design and implement a scaled-down computer interface device in computer software simulations, and understand basic concepts involved in its implementation and approval.