Director's Message 2023

To quote John Krasinski, I am pleased to share “some good news” with you in the form of our 2023 newsletter. This year we highlight the exciting range of entrepreneurial activities led by our faculty. Seeing our faculty research translate to clinical application and nucleate companies is extremely rewarding. Biomedical engineering often tops the list of fields with job growth, and these activities contribute to the growing professional opportunities for our graduates. 

Once again this past year we had several firsts for the Meinig School including our first five-year reunion class, the first undergraduate clinical immersion at Weill Cornell Medicine, and our first M.D.-M.Eng. graduate. Catching up with the Class of 2018 was special, and we look forward to seeing more of you return to campus next June for your fifth reunion. In August we welcomed two new M.D.-M.Eng. students to Ithaca. They have big shoes to fill given multiple projects that the program’s first graduate was engaged with, and we look forward to their contributions and unique perspectives. We also hired our first faculty member whose research focuses on education and pedagogy. As you’ll see in her profile, Alexandra Werth brings Cornell BME into the world of discipline-based engineering research, or DBER, an interest we’ve had for some time. As she establishes her own research program, we expect Alex will find lots of opportunities to collaborate with other enthusiastic BME faculty. And, most recently, we received our first ABET accreditation!

Looking forward, a year from now we hope to be transitioning to our new teaching space in the Thurston Hall addition. The construction has moved quickly, and one can now visualize the full structure on the Engineering quad. By the time this newsletter publishes, I expect the roof will have been added, and soon we’ll be lining up to tour the inside of the building. Next year, in 2024, we also will be celebrating our 20th anniversary, and this new teaching space couldn’t be a more welcome gift. As we welcome our largest class of undergraduate affiliates to date, the new space will be a welcome expansion for teaching our senior concentration labs and senior design to the Class of 2025. The space in Weill Hall opened up by the move will be essential to our future faculty hiring.

In the past year, we re-engaged in several activities that had been shuttered by the pandemic. In January our annual Cornell reception during the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference resumed. We joined with the Center for Technology Licensing and Cornell Life Sciences incubator to make a single Big Red gathering and hope to see everyone in San Francisco again this coming year. For our students, our career trek to visit biomedical industry in Boston resumed during January break. The two days of company visits kicked off with a networking reception, where at least one student found her current job through a contact. Next year we hope to resume the Bay Area career trek. And we’ll be out in Seattle this fall for the Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) annual meeting, which includes an alumni reception. Catching up with you, our alumni and friends, has been wonderful this year, and I look forward to hearing more of your good news! 

Sincerely,

Marjolein C.H. van der Meulen
James M. and Marsha McCormick
Director of Biomedical Engineering
Swanson Professor of Biomedical
Engineering