Bioengineering ramps up at USC

With a $3 million grant from the National Science Foundation, USC is recruiting several new faculty members with expertise in biological engineering.

USC's $3 million share of the three-year grant will help cover salary and laboratory start-up costs for the new faculty members, said Michael Amiridis, chair of the Department of Chemical Engineering and of a campus-wide committee on biomedical engineering.

“There has been a strong push from the National Academy of Engineering to incorporate biology into engineering,” Amiridis said. “Many of our peer institutions have strong biological components in engineering, and biology is joining chemistry and physics as core requirements in the sciences for chemical and mechanical engineering majors.”

Most of the new bioengineering faculty will be in the College of Engineering and Information Technology, but appointments also are expected in the School of Medicine and in the College of Arts and Sciences.

In a related initiative, the College of Engineering and Information Technology plans to offer undergraduate and graduate degree programs in biomedical engineering; the new degrees would be jointly administered by the chemical engineering and mechanical engineering departments.