Bringing life to engineering: Biological engineering at the graduate level

Biological engineering will be important for the future application of advances in biology to solve problems facing humankind. The philosophical foundation for broad undergraduate biological engineering programmes has previously been given, but biological engineering graduate programmes, where specialization normally occurs, have remained undefined. While specialization will continue in these graduate programmes, efforts must be made to relate research and teaching results to: (1) the analogical systems approach; and (2) the derivation of biological information to produce new general engineering techniques. Finally, a set of graduate-level core courses is suggested.