About the Department

Bioengineering is inherently cross-disciplinary. Our staff come from diverse academic disciplines such as physiology and medicine as well as mathematics, physics, chemistry and the different areas of engineering. Interaction between staff with these backgrounds ensures that the engineering is rigorous whilst retaining true biological or biomedical relevance. Our research aims to provide theoretical foundations, to propose and test hypotheses arising from an engineering perspective on biology and pathology, and to develop novel techniques for medicine and the health care industry.

Collaborations exist with almost every department at Imperial. Examples include interactions with the Biofluids group in Aeronautics concerning arterial and respiratory flow, and with the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Division of Surgery concerning musculoskeletal mechanics. The Department is also a founder of the Institute for Systems and Synthetic Biology at Imperial. Additionally, the founding Director of Imperial’s Institute of Biomedical Engineering was previously Head of the Department and strong links are maintained; most PhD students at the Institute are registered in the Department.

Internationally, the Department plays major roles in the EU SIMILAR Network of Excellence, the Imperial College London/MIT International Consortium for Medical Information Technology, the ‘HITS’ consortium (involving Imperial, Tokyo Tech., and Hanyang University), and the Cooperative Study on Brain Injury Depolarisations network. Four members of staff have sat on the World Council of Biomechanics, and the Department has recently hosted academic visitors from, among others, Canada, Denmark, Israel, Italy, Japan, Singapore, Switzerland, Ukraine and the USA.

Spinouts include the biomedical information systems company Visbion, Veryan Medical Ltd which is concerned with vascular grafts and stents, and HeliSwirl Technology Ltd which applies bioinspired fluid dynamic methods to industrial flows.