Director's Message 2024
This year marks the 20th anniversary of BME at Cornell. As we celebrate this milestone, it’s inspiring to reflect on the dedication and passion that have positioned Cornell BME as a top-ranked department and reflect on the amazing progress we’ve made together.
On July 1, I began my term as the new director of the Meinig School. I joined Cornell as an assistant professor in 2007 because of the university’s collaborative and collegial atmosphere. Over the past 20 years, the joint efforts of our exceptional faculty, staff, students, and postdocs have led to the development of strong undergraduate and graduate programs, as well as the infrastructure needed to deliver top-tier education and research—all united by our mission of engineering human health. You will see the spirit of this vibrant community in the following pages.
To ensure excellence and impact, a longstanding priority has been to create new space for our instructional labs and offices for our teaching faculty. We have now reached this important milestone with the official opening of Tang Hall. This new building creates a second hub for the Meinig School and places us next to other engineering departments in the middle of the Pew Engineering Quad. It provides state-of-the-art laboratories and learning spaces that both inspire our students and help drive our research forward.
In research, we also excelled. This year alone, scientific breakthroughs by our outstanding faculty and students were enabled by over $20 million in research funding (or $0.95 million per tenure-track core faculty) and resulted in 102 articles that were published in top peer-reviewed journals. Research highlights are described in this newsletter and include groundbreaking discoveries about how antibiotic resistance spreads in humans or which molecular programs regulate fertility and thus, may be involved in infertility. Our labs also developed new technologies that allow, for example, to 3D-print a human ear or to block epileptic seizures by precision laser treatments.
Our faculty, students, and postdocs not only pushed boundaries by performing cutting-edge research, but they are also leaders in community engagement. For example, our BMES Graduate Student Chapter hosted over a hundred young girls for “Girl Scout Engineering Day” to spark their interest in STEM. Additionally, our faculty and undergraduates collaborated with the Ithaca Sciencenter to create a traveling exhibit on Biobuilding.
Looking ahead, our goals remain ambitious. We will continue to transform medicine by bringing our cutting-edge research into clinical practice. Key priorities include strengthening our partnership with Weill Cornell Medicine, expanding our faculty, and advancing teaching methods to prepare the next generation of biomedical engineers.
I would like to express my deep gratitude to Marjolein van der Meulen for her exceptional leadership over the past 10 years, which has been instrumental in establishing Cornell BME as a premier department. I am honored to take on this role and look forward to working with all of you as we embark on the next 20 years of innovation, research, and education at Cornell BME.
Claudia Fischbach-Teschl
James M. and Marsha McCormick
Director of Biomedical Engineering
Stanley Bryer 1946 Professor of Biomedical Engineering