Thank you for the opportunity to speak to you today. I am here in my capacity as President of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), an organization representing over 35,000 bioengineers from academia, industry, and government, to advance medical and biological engineering for societal impact. I am also professor and chair of bioengineering at UCSF, where I have seen firsthand the impact of rapid technology development for preventing and combatting disease and addressing healthcare disparities.
I am heartened by the amazing progress that has been made over the past 18 months in accelerating fundamental biological and bioengineering discoveries to transformative biomedical technologies and lifesaving treatments. Whether it was prototyping and testing advanced PPE for healthcare workers, realizing nanoscale sensors for high sensitivity point of care diagnostic testing, or building on years of research in lipid nanoparticles to enable our highly effective mRNA vaccines to reach target cells in the body, engineering technologies have played a key role in biomedical innovation. What we have realized is that true breakthroughs do not often come from one discovery alone, but rather bringing together numerous advances from different fields to achieve a transformative goal. That is where bioengineers thrive – at the intersection of fields, at the intersection of basic and translational science, identifying gaps and proposing solutions… Continue reading.