INNOVATION January-February 2013

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As the oldest in Canada, the program has graduated over 700 biomedical engineering technologists (BMET). University of British Columbia Clinical Engineering Program The Clinical Engineering Program was established at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in 1980 and was directed by Dr. Charles A. Laszlo, P.Eng. The academic work in the pro- gram included both life and medical science courses and courses on medical technology and clinical engineering practice. A unique feature of the program was the one-year internship component, with major BC hospitals in Vancouver, Victoria, New Westminster, and Kelowna, and teaching hospitals in Montreal, Quebec, and Kingston, Ontario participating. At the time, the program offered the only master’s-level degree in clinical engineering in Canada. But, while the demand from both student applicants and employers was high, due to budget- ary restrictions the program was suspended in 1993. The program graduated 23 masters’ students, many of whom have gone on to play leading roles in health care delivery and the biomedical tech- nology industry in BC. Closely associated with the Clinical Engineering Program was Dr. Laszlo’s research group in biomedical engineering; while not a formal academic unit, this group performed extensive work on

muscle diagnostics and stimulation, hearing devices, diagnostic instrumentation and medical informatics. Biomedical Engineering Program Although retired from UBC, Dr. Laszlo’s passion for biomedical engineering led him and his wife Doreen to establish the Charles A. Laszlo Professorship in Biomedical Engineering in 2005. The endowed position was eventually grown to an endowed Chair in Biomedical Engineering at UBC and motivated the administra- tion to rethink the importance of biomedical engineering. The formalized Biomedical Engineering Program was re-established in 2006 under the leadership of Dr. Ezra Kwok, P.Eng., professor of chemical engineering and practicing physician. The program offers masters’ degrees in engineering and applied science, as well as doctoral degrees and accepted its first cohort of students in September 2006. The program emphasizes a balance of biomedical engineering and life science studies, with a focus on clinical and industrial application. Further to these graduate level studies, the UBC Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering began offering a bio- medical engineering option in its undergraduate degree program in September 2006, followed by the Department of Mechanical Engineering with a similar undergraduate option in September 2007. At the time, the Biomedical Engineering Program was the only graduate program of its kind in British Columbia. Simon Fraser University The Simon Fraser University (SFU) School of Engineering Science was established in 1982 by Drs. Donald George, P.Eng., and Tom Calvert, P.Eng., FEC, with the first students admitted in 1983. Dr. Andrew Rawicz, P.Eng., assumed the responsibility to design the biomedical curriculum and to lead teaching activities in this area. SFU’s undergraduate Biomedical Engineering Program is offered as an honours option, requiring students to maintain their grade point average above 3.0 and to write and defend a thesis. To ensure that graduates would have a broad range of employ- ment options, SFU’s biomedical engineering students were initially enrolled in one of the pure engineering options, supple- mented with life science courses. Over time, the curriculum has been strongly influenced by the SFU Gerontology program and the SFU School of Kinesiology, with the goal of making it responsive to the developing needs of Canada’s changing health care system and biomedical engineering industry. The Biomedical Engineering Program has since become a joint venture between Kinesiology and Engineering Science at SFU (as a stream in 1985) and was redesigned in 2004 (accepted by the Senate in 2005) to ensure a strong background in engi- neering tools paired with an understanding of their use derived from medicine and the life sciences. The result is a practical, down-to-earth program with graduates prepared for either industrial production or academic or industrial research and development. The program involves 11 professors and has graduated more than 70 honours students so far. The University of Victoria The University of Victoria (UVic) has a rich history in medi- cal device design including CanAssist, a unique organization that designs solutions for people with disabilities, founded in

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