A ceremony featuring Ed Schlesinger, Dean of the Whiting School of Engineering, celebrated the opening of the new Biomedical Engineering (BME) design studio on Monday evening. The studio was completed last summer and officially opened for student use in August.
“Engineering is about building stuff, doing stuff,” Schlesinger said in his introductory remarks.
Approximately 250 students utilize the studio on a weekly basis for lectures, design and instrumentation labs, group meetings, prototyping and testing. Three courses are also being held in the studio this semester — a freshman seminar called BME Modeling and Design, BME Design Team and Principles of Design of BME Instrumentation.
The new studio is approximately 3,000 square feet and includes a central work area with work tables, conference rooms designed for easy communication with the Johns Hopkins Medical Institution (JHMI), a rapid prototyping room, a wet lab, computers for CAD/CAM and a machine shop.
The purpose of the studio is to provide BME students the necessary space and resources for their engineering pursuits. It is built to inspire brainstorming, designing, prototyping, building and testing solutions to contemporary, real-world clinical and global health issues.
Eileen Haase, the instructor of the freshman seminar on BME Modeling and Design, has outlined some of the changes that she has already begun to see this year in the new studio.
“Before, we had a room about a third of the size of this one,” Haase said. “Up to 28 groups would have to work in shifts, and they had to leave their projects there. Because of the small space, it was a mess — things would get broken, parts would go missing. It was extremely frustrating for students... This year, the room is huge. There is lots of space for projects, allowing students to have a fun and enjoyable experience... The new space also makes it easier for them to interact with one another. They get to learn through cooperation and interaction and building their ideas off one another.”
Arda Ozilgen, the head lab manager for the freshman seminar, echoed Haase’s sentiments.
“I’ve been involved with this course for three years, and this was the year where I saw the most creativity by far,” Ozilgen said. “The main difference that we’ve seen is there is a lot more exchange of information between students... The way that this course used to be taught was severely limited by our confined space. We’ve actually restructured the course with the new studio.”
According to its website, the Provost’s Gateway Sciences Initiative (GSI) aims to promote innovation in introductory, or gateway, science courses.
“The grant awarded to BME is the largest one GSI has ever given,” Provost Robert Lieberman said. “We chose to make this award because we can immediately see the potential impact that a dedicated design studio would have on the educational system of our students. The resources put in place here are the things that enable engineers to do the very thing they are trained to do.”
The GSI funded the building of the new studio based on a proposal that Les Tung, Bob Allen, Youseph Yazdi and Elizabeth Logsdon, faculty members in the BME department, as well as Haase, submitted.
“This studio is a dream of mine,” Logsdon said. “Students were able to dream it, and now we have helped that dream become a reality.”
Logsdon presented the members of the GSI board with small molecular models that students had made from the new 3D printing machine in the studio.
The new design studio is also intended to further support interaction between the BME department and the JHMI. The studio is designed so that each conference room has planned links to the JHMI, allowing students to have audiovisual access for consultation with clinicians and researchers at the medical school campus.
Executive Vice Dean and Professor for the JHMI, Landon King, explained the underlying significance of maintaining close ties between the two departments.
“In order to truly impact health, [the JHMI] needs to partner together with the BME department, as we have for a long time, in order to make manifest the opportunity to translate great ideas,” King said. “We look forward to capitalizing on the advances of BME, and engineering as a whole, to do more things and to do better things.”
King also discussed the upcoming plans to build a facility on the JHMI campus that would act in conjunction with this new design studio.
“We are currently in the process of working to build a space like this on the East Baltimore campus,” King said. “We want to marry up the efforts of the new BME design studio here today.”
The new space has been made accessible to undergraduates, graduate students and instructors alike, and it is expected to help further develop and advance the Hopkins BME program, which is currently ranked as number one in the nation.
“These resources will empower students from their very first day in a gateway course, such as BME Modeling & Design, to come into a facility like this at Hopkins and experience all that it has to offer,” Lieberman said. “This is the first step to launching the students’ own journey to excellence — this really is the hallmark of Johns Hopkins.”
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