BioMedical Engineering Department

The vision of the Biomedical Engineering Department is to promote integrative research, education and entrepreneurship at the forefront of biomedical science and engineering. We will jealously maintain the following characteristics of our activities: high quality, sustainability and usefulness.

In Research, we believe that to excel in educating biomedical engineers, a strong research-oriented department is critical, where faculty are actively involved in cutting-edge, externally-funded research programs.  The focus on research will guarantee dynamic and up-to-date curricula and provide opportunities for hands-on and laboratory experiences for undergraduate students and an environment where graduate students can perform and contribute to high-level discovery. We recruit faculty who are passionate with research and desire to investigate topics that exist only in Vietnam to make them as signatures of our Department. We will provide adequate laboratory to satisfy their needs and provide logistics to help them to be successful in their research. The success in Research of the Department will be measured by the number of publications, the number of external grants obtained and the number of citations in science indexes of its publications.

In Education, we will develop a curriculum that is an appropriate blend between basic and applied sciences and between fundamental knowledge and practical applications. The curriculum will be designed based on the Vietnamese traditional background, current needs of the society, our long term vision and the guideline of the U.S. Accreditation Board of Engineering and Technology (ABET). By consequent, it will not only response to the real and urgent needs of Vietnam in the healthcare but also aim to pursue the long term life sciences research trench in the global scientific world. Therefore, it will reflect the current real world and be flexible to be transformed along with the progress of the society. The core of this curriculum is based on 2 concepts: Mentoring Team and Surrogate Department. In the Mentoring Team concept, the students will be nurtured by becoming members of a team composing of a faculty member, post doctoral fellow, graduate students and undergraduate students. During four years of study students will learn engineering skills, research approaches, critical thinking, technical writing, and how to develop innovative ideas. They will also learn about team dynamics, communication (oral and written) skills and scientific and engineering depth in their field. Importantly, as the students progress into the later part of the program, they become mentors to the new students joining their respective Mentorship Teams. This process will provide additional educational experiences for this aspect of team dynamics, as well as providing the self-sustaining features to the process. In the Surrogate Department concept we will collaborate with top-notch U.S. universities or BME programs to solicit their mentorship in teaching advanced courses. We will videotape the lectures of selected U.S. faculty and pass them on to the Vietnamese teachers who are in charge of identical courses in our Department. The Vietnamese teachers will study the tapes, communicate with the U.S. professors to clarify unclear issues before showing the tapes to students and tutor them in class. The Vietnamese professors will administer homework, quiz and exams to the Vietnamese students according to the instructions of the US professors. This way we will improve the level of both Vietnamese faculty and students and bring the teaching and learning to the world class level. Depending on the situation and the nature of the courses we can use Adobe Connect or WebEx or videoconferencing methods instead, to have a real time interactive communication between the Vietnamese students and U.S. faculty. We will recruit faculty who devote to the excellent teaching and advising students, and embrace new teaching methods, materials (such as Open Courseware); and to disseminate new scientific discoveries. The success of the Education is measured by the number of students who get admitted to renown higher education universities or programs abroad, the number of outstanding Clinical Engineers and entrepreneurs, and the approval of the degree by ABET.

As mentioned above, the BME Department concentrates on the Education at the Undergraduate level. One of the reasons is that, in the developed countries such as the U.S., because of the state of advancement of their research, they need outstanding students capable of carrying high level research and are therefore ready to financially cover the education of these students at the Ph.D. level (in assuming the formation of these students through the Mater's level). By contrast, very few U.S. universities give financial aids to foreign undergraduate students. In addition, the Vietnamese Ministry of Education and Training (MOET) plans to send 20,000 students abroad during the next 10 years to study at the Ph.D. level. Hence, our strategy is to well prepare Vietnamese students so that they can enter top notch foreign graduate programs, and to create appropriate infrastructures and appealing working conditions to attract graduates to come back. We will also develop educational infrastructure and operations to stimulate the students to learn beyond the requirements. We also recognize the importance of establishing a Graduate program and a Continuing Education program in our Department. The Graduate program will be built primarily on the good matching research interest between an individual student and the Department faculty. The course requirements then will be built around it to help students acquire basic and specific knowledge useful for his/her research. The Continuing Education program will be established for individuals who have strong background and working experience in other fields but want to re-direct their interests in BME. There will be a set of courses that allow these people fulfill their goals.

In Entrepreneurship, we strive to develop new medical devices from new research discoveries, identify the needs in the market to feed new research ideas to other faculty and promote startup companies or incubators. A strong entrepreneurial leadership aspect is included in the Department since most of the new directions, innovations and concepts are being developed by small companies started by talented scientists and engineers, or by new ventures within existing biomedical engineering companies. We, therefore, plan to establish synergistic relationships with industry for technology transfer, student internships, and university/industry joint research or technology development projects. We will recruit faculty who have strong experience in related industry such as inventors, investors, managers, and entrepreneurs who devote their time and enthusiasm to train the new generation professionals. The success of the Entrepreneurship will be measured by the quality of students pursue their career in private sector.

A key aspect of Biomedical Engineering is its interdisciplinary nature. We plan to complement the full-time faculty in the BME department with adjunct faculty members from outside the department and outside International University such as schools of Medicine and Pharmacy, schools of Dental Medicine, HCM city University of Technology and HCM city University of Natural Science who contribute to the research program and/or teaching. One of the key initiatives is the developments of the "Engineering Challenges in Medicine" courses and seminars. In these courses and seminars, faculty of the aforementioned schools will teach anatomy, physiology and pathology to engineering faculty and students, and reveal their needs of new biomedical devices and novel measurement methods of vital signals to be able to accomplish their works. These revelations will trigger critical thinking and initiatives for new research and application topics from engineering students and faculty. Our adjunct faculty members will also include those from schools of Pedagogy who will chaperon our students who desire to direct their career in education, and individuals from industry who want to devote their time to teach our student in management, creativity and leadership.

In summary, our vision is to promote integrative research, education and entrepreneurship at the forefront of biomedical science and engineering. To this end, we aim toward a short term and practical goal to satisfy the urgent needs of the country (with the design and applications of medical instrumentation orientation) and at the same time toward a long term goal to prepare the country to participate into the cutting edge and globalization scientific research (with the regenerative medicine orientation). Our approach is to use the undergraduate education as a nucleus, and expand in different directions upward by well preparing part of our students to continue into higher education, look straight ahead by preparing others to become excellent clinical engineers or medical entrepreneurs and look downward by preparing others to become reformist K-12 science teachers.

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The vision of the Biomedical Engineering Department is to promote integrative research, education and entrepreneurship at the forefront of biomedical science and engineering. We will jealously maintain the following characteristics of our activities: high quality, sustainability and usefulness...