Exploring Engineering Ep. 03: Bioengineering

Kevin Healy
Sometimes the criticism of bioengineering is, you’re the jack of all trades, but expert of none. What could attract students is this broad-based educational experience in engineering, but always applied to biology.

Laura Vogt
That was Kevin Healy, a UC Berkeley faculty member, giving us a quick introduction into how interdisciplinary bioengineering is. We’ll hear more from him later in this episode.

Hi, I’m Laura Vogt, the host and producer of this podcast Exploring Engineering at UC Berkeley. I’m part of the Berkeley Engineering marketing and communications team in my role as the director of student communications. I’m really enjoying the time I’ve spent learning more about each of the engineering majors. Today’s episode is diving into bioengineering and how you can begin your exploration, what prompted others to focus on the major, and some of the misconceptions that float around.
Our first conversation today is with a recent graduate, Na’im Pierce. When I talked with him a few months ago, he was still completing his degree.

Na’im Pierce
Hi everyone. My name is Na’im Pierce. I’m a fourth year here at UC Berkeley, studying bioengineering. I’m originally from San Francisco. I went to Archbishop Riordan High School. So I was fortunate enough to come to UC Berkeley and stay close to home.

So I’ve always been interested in science, specifically biology. I would think originally I was interested in genetic engineering. And so when choosing majors and such, I saw that Berkeley didn’t have one, so I figured bioengineering was close to that. I really didn’t understand the full capacity of genetic engineering, originally. So I kind of thought it was like one thing. And so I think I was fortunate to end up with bioengineering because it kind of encapsulated not only genetic engineering, but a whole bunch of other things, like going with both biology and the engineering practices as well. And so I really like bioengineering overall.

I think the biggest misconception would just be not fully knowing what engineering is. I’d say that now probably my definition of engineering is kind of just seeing a problem and kind of fixing that or improving a quantum that already exists. I think that’s pretty broad, but I guess just adding something before engineering, like bioengineering, nuclear engineering, industrial engineering, just kind of applies that same definition of the word to the subject. And so, for example, bioengineering, I think it’s like finding biological issues and kind of fixing that, or seeing an issue that may already have a solution, but trying to improve upon that.

Which is, I think a medical device is a really good example of that. I think there are already a lot of devices that exist within medicine that can help with surgeries and such, but a lot of work now is working to see if you can improve upon that. And so I think that’s a pretty good example.

Around my junior year of high school, junior or sophomore, I think junior year of high school, I wanted to be a neurosurgeon, and I think that is staying true as of now. I think if anything, college just gave me an opportunity to dive deeper in that interest, both within academics and also just research. I think because it’s a major that encapsulates everything, you’re going to be taking courses in all the main scientific areas of Biology, Chemistry, Organic Chemistry, Physics. It’s extremely advanced and complicated math courses. And so I think definitely just to prepare themselves for all the academics that are going to come before them.

I think it’s really rewarding, it’s really fun. I think all the professors are pretty supportive. And then also, most of them do their own research, and just learning about their own research is extremely cool. One of my professors right now, in a setting like aging in the microscopy course I’m taking, they’re focusing on microscopy and such, and just learning about all these cool techniques and subsets within science. I think it’s really cool. And just the fact that I can be studying something on what we may not think is surface level—pretty surface level compared to all the cool research being done within the bioengineering department. So definitely, exploring all the opportunities within the department is something really important to do.

Laura Vogt
For our faculty interview about bioengineering, we are excited to have professor Kevin Healy. He’s being interviewed by assistant dean for marketing and communications in the College of Engineering, Sarah Yang. They covered a lot of topics for another day, but this episode, we focused on bioengineering and what it can offer students and their goals of serving society.

Kevin Healy
My name is Kevin Healy. I’m a professor appointed in departments of bioengineering and materials science and engineering here at UC Berkeley. I started January 1, 2000. I was at Northwestern for 10 years before that, and I came right out of my grad degree from Penn.

When I was young, somehow I got interested in exercise physiology. I was still in middle school, although it counted for high school. So we had some health teachers that really got you into exercise and the heart. They had us do jump roping and stuff. This was the early idea of heart physiology. That got my interest. I became a lifeguard, and I had to learn CPR, and became interested in that. Then I eventually started to volunteer. I would sit at the, I’ll call it, the control center, and just watch EKGs of folks in different parts of the hospital.

Then, going through high school, I think the real stimulus might have been Barney Clark. He was the recipient of the first artificial heart. If you remember, he looked like he would walk around with what looked like an airport wheeled suitcase, but that was the battery pack to basically power the heart. There were innovations that came afterward, and the total artificial heart never became a clinical product. That was kind of my motivation in high school, 1979.

Sarah Yang
So you were talking about the health and medical aspects of the inspiration. Like, what would get someone to veer more to engineering, bioengineering side of things, versus going into medical school and that track?

Kevin Healy
There was a time I thought about going to medical school, and then I realized, I really don’t want to deal with a lot of sick people coughing on me. What I want to do is help them. And I thought the best way to do that was some sort of technology.

So back to the artificial heart. It’s really a cool thing. It has mechanical engineering in it. It has biomaterials. It turns out a lot of these large-scale implants, the mechanics, the fundamental material science, is figured out pretty early on. Then it’s the biological response that tends to lead to failure. For example, with the artificial heart, you had to worry about blood clotting on the internal surface of the beating material. You also had to worry about whether that material degrades, how long it can last. Patients are full of anticoagulants. You had to power this thing. So you needed some sort of electrical connection through the skin. We call that a percutaneous connection, which is robust for infection. The only percutaneous connection that doesn’t really get infected is your teeth, which is kind of amazing if you think about it.

Sarah Yang
I hadn’t thought about it.

Kevin Healy
Yeah, so it’s very hard to make these things, especially not in 1979 or early 1980s. That’s where the engineering comes in, and that was the stimulus.

Sarah Yang
If you’re going into this, what are your thoughts about career-wise? Like, what are the people who graduate with a bioengineering degree doing?

Kevin Healy
Career paths, right? I think the misconception is that everybody works in a hospital or pre-med. That’s not true at all. Medical device companies, yes, certainly the major medical device companies, pharmaceutical, biotech firms, research and development organizations, commercial CDMOs—contract manufacturing organizations. These companies are set up to take on contract manufacturing.

An example might be a biological product, a biologic that needs to be produced commercially. We call Good Manufacturing Practice, GMP, which might be scaling up for clinical trials. That is an area where a bioengineering student could play a big role. They not only learn fundamentals but also experimental techniques like basic biochemistry, molecular and cell biology, cell biology related to how to culture cells, and how to run assays and experiments with cells. This falls into how you would scale it up in research and development companies.

Certainly, some go to graduate school or medical school. Yes, that’s true. Consulting firms as well. I’ve had a number of graduate students, especially if the technologies are early on, like when stem cell technology was just starting. But on average, about 50 to 60% of our students go on to graduate schools, including dental school, law school, medical school, and graduate school in bioengineering disciplines.

Sarah Yang
I’m kind of wondering, looking at the past decades, what have you seen change in the field? Is there something that excites you, something really cool? Where do you see this field going?

Kevin Healy
From my perspective, which is a subset of bioengineering, two main themes: medical devices, and in this case, micro medical devices. These are what we call organ chips, or tissue chips. Some people call them micro physiological systems, which is our preferred name because they’re sort of like an integrated circuit that has biological tissue in it.
Instead of copper connecting different parts of the circuit, we have fluidic channels with media or fluid over the cell tissue construct. The idea is these micro physiological systems will replace early animal experiments in preclinical development of drugs or other systems.

Sarah Yang
You know, when you were talking about microfluidics and chips, I know there are people in mechanical engineering doing that. I feel like there are areas of overlap.

Kevin Healy
A big part of these micro physiological systems or tissue chips is that you have to have fundamentals in fluid mechanics, which you mostly think of in mechanical engineering. But we also teach our students fluid mechanics and solid mechanics in bioengineering. We also teach them transport, which you would learn in chemical engineering.

Sarah Yang
Why would someone choose bioengineering over other fields? What do you think really attracts people?

Kevin Healy
The interdisciplinary nature combines engineering with biology and medicine. That’s exciting. It’s a unique educational experience and an opportunity to impact human health and quality of life. Also, some faculty really aren’t working in that part, but engineering bacteria for other technological uses.

This comes out of synthetic biology, a rapidly growing field. I think of bioengineering as the center of it, like the hand, and all your fingers—more than 10 fingers—going out in many directions. It’s constantly evolving.

Laura Vogt
Our last interview for today’s podcast is an alum. I always find it interesting to hear how alums choose their majors, as well as which college or university they decided to attend. Was it family guidance, peer reviews, or the program?

Trishley Nubla
My name is Trishley Nubla, and I graduated Berkeley in December 2022. My undergrad program, I finished in three and a half years, and my major was bioengineering.

Back in high school, around sophomore to junior year, I thought I was dead set on medical school. My family comes from healthcare backgrounds, and bioengineering was a very foreign major to me because there weren’t many programs. If there were, it was at amazing and challenging schools such as Berkeley.

When I was a junior in high school, I volunteered at a local Title I elementary school. Title I means the government provides extra support to students from low-income families. The kids I helped tutor had many assistive disability devices, like wheelchairs and prosthetics. One day, I decided to Google prosthetics and orthopedics.

I kind of fell into the world of medical devices and what careers and avenues bioengineering/biomedical engineering offered. That’s how I chose my major going into Berkeley. In my high school, there weren’t really classes that taught about medical devices. We had robotics teams, but having exposure from my family to the healthcare system and hospitals also helped bring that background.

Laura Vogt
If somebody told you they’re interested in bioengineering, what do you think they should do?

Trishley Nubla
I would honestly say the Berkeley bioengineering page was where I first started. From there, I found an Instagram page where I had mutuals and reached out to students directly. The weekend after Cal Day, when I visited campus for the first time, I spoke to students at Kresge. They were extremely friendly, gave me general advice about Berkeley Engineering, and helped set my expectations. That was really nice.

I think the community, in general, is extremely friendly.

Laura Vogt
Do you have any final thoughts about being a bioengineering graduate?

Trishley Nubla
I would say don’t be scared to take risks. The way everyone gets into Berkeley is an accomplishment on its own. Because everyone is already successful going into college, it’s okay not to have your next five or ten steps planned. Taking risks is definitely okay. We’re young enough to learn and explore the world, and keep ourselves open to things like science or medical updates.

Another recommendation I have is to sign up for newsletters and learn about current medical devices, Big Pharma drug updates, because it’s nice to be informed of new, upcoming therapies and solutions for patients worldwide.

Laura Vogt
Once again, this is just scratching the surface of getting to know more about bioengineering and what you can do with a degree in it. I hope this introduction has given you a place to start your research into bioengineering.
Please check our podcast webpage, engineering.berkeley.edu/exploringengineering, for more information, including links to resources, videos, and transcripts. We’re also excited to link to videos produced by Girls in Engineering that are introductions to engineering majors and topics.

Share this podcast series with your friends, classmates, and schools so others can learn and explore what being an engineer means.