20th Anniversary Essays From Previous Months
October Featured Essay
Catherine Applegate
Bioengineering combines biology and other sciences, mathematics, and diverse areas of engineering into a synthetic whole to solve medical problems. The origins and definitions surrounding the terms “bioengineering,” or “biomedical engineering,” are nebulous. Some would go back as far as 3000 BC when Imhotep, the engineer of the first pyramid, also practiced as a physician. Or perhaps we would move further forward to 1780 AD to Luigi Galvani’s studies of animal electricity, wherein he observed that frog legs twitched when sparked with electricity, inspiring the classic tale of Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. Or just one century later to 1895 when Wilhem Conrad Röntgen discovered X-rays and subsequently donated his Nobel Prize winnings to his university and refused to patent his discovery on the grounds that all people should benefit from biomedical imaging. Scientists have clearly been merging biology and engineering for thousands of years, but it was only in the decades following WWII that bioengineering was officially established as its own discipline.
Personally, I am grateful to be a cancer research scientist during such a time when bioengineering advancements are moving at such a fast pace. Chemotherapy was initiated in the 1940s, which, as we know, is just calculated poisoning with the goal being to deliver just enough poison to kill the cancer but not the patient. Forty years later, bioengineering advancements led to the development of immunotherapies that more effectively target cancers and cause less damage to healthy tissues to lead not only to better therapeutic outcomes but also to improved patient quality of life. My dad worked at Genentech as an early robotics specialist, where he worked on fixing and maintaining the instruments that produced and packaged Herceptin, which was one of the earlier immunotherapies to be FDA-approved for treatment of HER2+ breast cancers and which marked a paradigm shift in treating aggressive subtypes of breast cancer. Who could then imagine that, 20 years later, his daughter would be reaping the benefits of the work he was part of.
I entered the world of bioengineering research during a chaotic phase in my life, one which continues to ebb and flow as I have recently experienced my 4th personal cancer diagnosis with my 3rd unique cancer. My own cancer treatment during the final year of my PhD, during which I was studying the impact of nutrition on cancer, was so inspirational and motivational, as it led me to form a deep and personal appreciation for how bioengineering was being applied to save my own life. I experienced first-hand what an improvement immunotherapy was over the more established and toxic chemotherapy. I was still sick with immunotherapy, but my body wasn’t shutting down like it started to after chemotherapy. As an outspoken cancer research advocate, I continue to see how bioengineering could be further advanced to improve outcomes and lives for fellow cancer patients.
I am appreciative of the department of bioengineering here at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for harboring a diverse set of determined scientific leaders who encourage collaboration and innovation. This encouragement enables me to work on projects I feel passionate about and which can be quickly translated to a clinical setting if successful. Studying during my postdoc in the bioengineering department under extremely intelligent and supportive mentors has shaped my future path as a scientist by showing me a new way to study cancer, one which will enable me to have a quantitatively wide and meaningful impact. I am excited and honored to be granted the gift of being on both a scientific and personal journey with cancer and bioengineering, during which I get to experience and benefit from its clinical effects, provide my own biological samples for research in the hopes of helping future patients, and contribute to the development of new and improved cancer therapeutics through my own research. I hope to share the patient experience with other cancer researchers and, through bioengineering and other interdisciplinary fields, work together to design better, less toxic therapies to enable all cancer patients to experience less difficulties associated with their current treatment regimens. I am grateful for my own experience and the advanced therapy I received as a direct result of bioengineering advancements. To me, bioengineering research is a path for me to pay it forward.
Bioengineering also represents a wider path for science moving forward. In an era where the convergence of diverse disciplines is imperative for addressing complex scientific challenges, bioengineering stands as a beacon of collaborative innovation, heralding a future where interdisciplinary voices unite to redefine the boundaries of human health. I consider it a great privilege to be alive during this notable time, witnessing the remarkable advancements being made in bioengineering. Being able to participate in celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Bioengineering Program, knowing its profound impact on addressing critical human health challenges, fills me with honor and gratitude. I am beyond grateful to the brilliant scientists of this program whose innovative work has brought forth clinically significant advancements, particularly impacting individuals like myself with chronic illnesses. Your dedication to improving human health through bioengineering inspires hope for countless patients worldwide.
September Featured Essay
Professor Jenny Amos
In reflecting on the past 15 years in the department, I have seen so much growth and change. When I joined the department in 2009, there were only 6 faculty and we were building the curriculum as we went along. We slowly began adapting courses offered outside the major to courses offered inside the major, for instance, like how a biophysics course was converted to modeling human physiology and biomaterials was converted to tissue engineering. My first semester, I taught the capstone class to the second cohort and I had 25 students. Most of our classes were taught in a small classroom in a corner of the second floor of the Digital Computer Lab (DCL), which is also where all of the faculty and staff offices were located - all together, in one little hallway.
As the cohorts grew, we slowly took over more and more of DCL until the college agreed that we needed our own building. We were lucky that the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department had decided to build a new building and was vacating Everitt Lab and, at the same time, Grainger was donating a large gift to the college with some money earmarked for the future home of bioengineering. Everitt Lab is a great location on the Bardeen quad and has a strong history of engineering education and impact named after an engineering icon, William L. Everitt.
We were so fortunate to have the unique opportunity to be involved in the design of the building teaching spaces to allow us to offer education the way that we wanted to offer it. We designed the building to feature active learning classrooms and ample lab spaces dedicated to teaching. We were one of the first programs on campus to embrace active-learning pedagogy across our core courses and we also have the most required labs in our curriculum. Having this unique opportunity to define our curriculum from scratch and to have access to well-designed teaching spaces opened up a new area of research in our department, engineering education.
Many of the teaching faculty are recognized as leaders in this area of research worldwide for our work in studying the impact of our teaching style on the development of our students as skilled engineers, the impacts of labs in building bioengineering identity, and the impacts of K-12 outreach and summer camps to create opportunities to recruit and retain a diverse body of students to name a few areas. Due to our innovative educational research, we have been awarded numerous educational grants to disseminate our teaching models and numerous external awards in recognition of excellence in engineering education. Notably, many of our Bioengineering faculty were also foundational in creating other related programs on campus such as the Cancer Scholars program, the AI in Medicine Certificate, and the curriculum for the first-of-its-kind engineering-based medical school, Carle-Illinois College of Medicine.
Recognizing that our 20th cohort has just graduated, we now have alumni from our program all over the world bringing their bioengineering knowledge and skills to every industry. We have graduates in policy and law, business and investment firms, medical technology companies, medical device companies, personal product companies, practicing as physicians, dentists, nurses, and prosthetists, and so much more. They have helped to reshape what the world thinks a bioengineering graduate can do because they have shown that the skills they learned in the bioengineering curriculum can be applied to every career path. We are so proud of all of their accomplishments and hope that they will keep in touch with us as they continue to redefine what bioengineers can do and raise the bar on the impact that bioengineering has on the world.