Creativity in Biomedical Engineering

UC Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering Mary Beth Privitera spoke about breaking down the barriers to creativity in biomedical engineering in a video taken at the Biomedical Engineering Idea and Teaching Lab, held at Northwestern University June 27-30.

Privitera was invited to the meeting to teach a select group of biomedical engineering faculty and students best practices regarding the design of medical devices moving towards commercialization.

At UC, Privitera co-directs the Medical Device Innovation & Entrepreneurship Program, which brings students from the colleges of business, engineering, and design, art, architecture and planning (DAAP) to solve problems in the medical fields.

Each year, the students are grouped into teams and paired with mentors from the College of Medicine, UC Health University Hospital or outside industry to work on improving current or inventing new medical devices. Recent teams have placed among the top three winners in the BMEidea competition, sponsored by the

National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance (NCIIA) and the National Science Foundation (NSF).

This year's

Biomedical Engineering Idea and Teaching Lab

was sponsored by the NCIIA, the NSF, the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Kauffman foundation and the Biomedical Engineering Society and included faculty from Johns Hopkins Medical Device Center.