Undergraduate Curriculum Guide

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Welcome to the study of biomedical engineering at Vanderbilt University. To fulfill our department's mission and achieve our objectives, the BME faculty has designed the curriculum described in this guide. If you follow this curriculum, the objectives will be met for you specifically and you will be prepared for the next stage of your life as a biomedical engineer. In particular, this curriculum is designed to provide you with certain outcomes including an ability to apply engineering, math, and science principles to problems in medicine and biology, an ability to design, conduct, and analyze experiments,  a broad education including biology and physiology as well as the humanities and social sciences.

 

As is the case for most things worth learning, biomedical engineering as a field is too broad to cover in its entirety in an undergraduate curriculum. BME spans a wide range of particular interests from devices that allow us to see inside the body without opening it to systems of equations that provide insight into how the circulatory system responds to changes in cardiac function; from the observation and determination of how microscopic cells and groups of cells control macroscopic events to management of the information flow in a medical center. While you may choose to focus on a particular part of BME, a working knowledge of other material is essential. Consequently, our curriculum will provide you the broad fundamentals of biomedical engineering and then allow you the flexibility to concentrate on your particular area of interest in your junior and senior years. Rather than being forced to choose from fixed specialty tracks, the curriculum gives you the opportunity to build on required core knowledge and explore and define your own area(s) of concentration for higher level study.

Download: [rev. 4/2009]
BME Curriculum Guide (PDF)

The roster of faculty, basic curriculum and descriptions of all classes are found in the Undergraduate Catalog, also known as The Bulletin, published annually by the University.