Breakthroughs in Medicine and Diversity
The idea for this month’s cover story on advanced biomanufacturing came from Gilda Barabino, a member of our Editorial Advisory Board. Besides her day job as engineering dean at the City College of New York, she’s the immediate past president of the Biomedical Engineering Society. Her suggestion was on target. As Tom Grose reports in “Human Spare Parts,” the day is not far off when “tissues grown on scaffolds expressly designed to fit a patient’s needs could be used to treat cartilage or bone defects. Cell-infused myocardial patches could be affixed to tissue damaged by a heart attack to help it regain normal strength.” The prospect of replacing whole organs is no longer science fiction.
For years, Prism has noted the stubbornly low proportion of women engineering graduates. But some schools have succeeded in bucking the trend – and without mirrors or magic. Their secret? As Margaret Loftus writes in “Piercing the 20 Percent Ceiling,” each has cultivated a culture of making women feel welcome and a shared commitment across departments to increase the number of female students. If other schools follow the examples Loftus presents, perhaps the needle will start to move nationally.
Elsewhere in Prism, we welcome a new columnist, Chris Rogers, who will be writing about educational technology. Also, ASEE President Nicholas Altiero updates members on a board initiative called Strategic Doing, and the Society’s varied activities and services to members are highlighted in the Annual Report.
Flip this magazine over, and read about all there is to see and do in Seattle, where we hope you will join us in June at ASEE’s 122nd Annual Conference and Exposition. Check out highlights of the conference program, much of which is already scheduled.
Mark Matthews
m.matthews@asee.org
CORRECTION: A reader alerted us to incorrect figures in the January Databytes. ASEE staffers are working to figure out where the error occurred. Once they do, we will correct the online version at asee-prism.org.