Biomedical engineering
opportunities 'exploding,' Hennessy tells Senate
The School of Engineering
is poised for new challenges in the biomedical
engineering area as it continues a tradition of seeking
out new research areas, outgoing Dean John Hennessy told
the Faculty Senate last week in a presentation on the
school.
Hennessy's broad-ranging
remarks came as he prepared to step down as dean to
become university provost on July 1.
"I think the
opportunities at the intersection of engineering and the
biological sciences are simply exploding," Hennessy
said. "We need to move in this area quickly and
forcefully.
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"Stanford's
challenge, in some sense, is to build on its diversity of
interests in this area. We currently have faculty who
range across the entire spectrum in almost every
department that have some collaboration either with the
biological sciences department or with departments in the
medical school."
The engineering school now
has more than 20 faculty with interests in the area.
"I wouldn't be surprised in 10 years if we had 40
faculty -- or 20 percent of our faculty -- working on
some interface between the biological sciences and
engineering," he said.
The projects now under way
include work on creating new microbes to eat
environmental pollutants; work on the problems of doing
real-time cardiovascular imaging and real-time cardiac
imaging; and simulation of the musculoskeletal system to
make implants last longer.
He noted that the School
of Engineering made a joint appointment with the School
of Medicine last year and hoped to make another
appointment in the coming academic year.
Developing curricula and
degree programs in biomedical engineering are in the
"early stages of development," he said, and
likely begin at the M.S. and Ph.D. levels.
Speaking more generally
about the engineering school, Hennessy remarked on its
national reputation.
Five of the school's eight
departments are ranked in the top three nationally, he
said, and the school has the largest number of new
electees to the National Academy of Engineering this year
-- more than any other industrial institution or
university.
It also grants about 1,300
degrees a year, or about 30 percent of the university's
total number of degrees, he said.
Computer science is
gaining in popularity, and last year more than 80 percent
of undergraduates had taken at least one computer science
course, Hennessy added. As more students major in
computer science, there has been a small drop in the
number of engineering majors.
"Computer science is
growing quickly as a major, but it seems to be drawing
primarily from other engineering majors rather than from
other majors in the university," he said. Efforts
are under way to strengthen undergraduate engineering
research opportunities.
Hennessy also described
the engineering school's efforts at distance learning.
The school has the largest distance education program
among research universities in the country.
The Stanford Center for
Professional Development offers 250 courses, and the
school has awarded over 5,000 master's degrees through
distance education. Increasingly, career professionals
take Stanford courses without pursuing a specific degree.
"We see a gradual
shift from an early program which provided primarily
master's degrees to a program which now provides lifelong
education for many Stanford alumni in the [Silicon]
Valley," he said.
"They're coming back
to take a sequence of courses in computer networking or
the Internet, or coming back to take a sequence of
courses in microelectronics design," Hennessy said.
Distance learning is
gradually shifting from television and video technology
to the Internet. By the end of this year, the goal is to
have 50 percent of distance learning courses offered
online, he said. SR
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