My career did not follow the typical path of most academics. It began in 1980 when I was a product development engineer for DePuy, an orthopedics manufacturer, designing knee, ankle, and toe implants. I then worked for three other medical device companies where I learned about medical device design, new product development, and engineering management. After working in industry for fourteen years, I earned my Ph.D. in biomedical engineering (BME) from Northwestern University and began my academic career.
Twenty-five years ago, with my newly earned Ph.D., I left my position as the Director of Technology and Quality Assurance for a startup dental products company to become the director of the newly created graduate Healthcare Technologies Management Program at Marquette University and the Medical College of Wisconsin. During my first year, I was asked to be a guest speaker in our multidisciplinary senior capstone design course. After inquiring about the course, I suggested some changes to the course curriculum to make it more relevant and up-to-date and was then asked if I would be interested in teaching the course. I said yes.
In academia, my mission has always been to prepare students for life after graduation. Most of our BME students end up in industry, so my goal was to prepare them for successful, rewarding, ethical, and meaningful careers in the medical device industry. I identified the topics that, while working in industry, I wish I had learned in school: regulatory requirements, standards, manufacturing operations, and others. I made sure that these were included in our course.
After 24 years of teaching the senior capstone design course at Marquette University with colleagues from computer, electrical, and mechanical engineering, I have learned much about how to provide students with a hands-on, team-based, design experience that will prepare them for professional practice. During this time, I have attended, participated in, and given many presentations on this subject at Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES), American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE), Capstone Design Conference, and BME-idea (BME Innovation, Design, and Entrepreneurship Alliance) meetings.
I am very passionate about the biomedical engineer’s contribution to health care and potential impact on the health care system and began writing this column in 2003 to share ideas and best practices for teaching BME senior capstone design courses. I eventually published two books based on the content of these columns [1], [2] and coauthored a book chapter on capstone design courses [3]. Based on feedback from readers, fellow instructors, industry advisory board members, personal industry contacts, and my own personal experiences while working in industry, I learned that there are many ways to teach design. To share what I learned during my career, both in industry and academia, I coauthored a textbook titled Biomedical Engineering Design [4] in 2022, to be used in BME capstone and other design courses.
This is my 50th and final column written on capstone design. The columns covered topics ranging from team formation to developing students’ clinical and business literacy, intellectual property to incorporating design controls, and medical device standards to entrepreneurship in student design projects. It is time to hand off this responsibility, opportunity, and privilege to a new design instructor or group of instructors to provide their unique perspectives and approaches to teaching design. Moving forward, the editor of this publication will be looking for guest columnists to contribute to this column. If you are interested in contributing a guest column on a topic related to senior capstone design courses (or the broader topic of design), please let me know.
I would like to thank the editors of IEEE EMBS Magazine and IEEE Pulse for giving me the opportunity to write this column. I also would like to thank my fellow senior design instructors and members of the BME design education community for sharing their ideas and practices and helping me learn about the different ways to approach and teach BME design.
This column has given me a voice, provided a platform to share my industry perspective, and enabled me to relate engineering education to professional practice. It helped me build my personal national network of design instructors and allowed me to fulfill my mission as an educator and promote BME as a profession.
I hope you have found this column useful and helpful in your teaching of BME design. Thanks for reading this column, providing me with your feedback, and investing in your students to prepare them for successful, meaningful, and impactful careers.
References
- J. R. Goldberg, Capstone Design Courses: Producing Industry-Ready Biomedical Engineers. San Rafael, CA, USA: Morgan & Claypool, 2007.
- J. R. Goldberg, Capstone Design Courses: Preparing Biomedical Engineers for the Real World. San Rafael, CA, USA: Morgan & Claypool, 2012.
- S. Howe and J. Goldberg, “Engineering capstone design education: Current practices, emerging trends, and successful strategies,” in Design Education Today, D. Schaefer, G. Coates, and C. Eckert, Eds., Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2019.
- J. Tranquillo, J. Goldberg, and R. Allen, Biomedical Engineering Design. New York, NY, USA: Academic, Jun. 2022.