Stellenbosch to offer postgraduate degrees in biomedical engineering
POSTGRADUATE programmes in biomedical engineering will be offered at Stellenbosch University from next year.
“It is with immense pleasure, and anticipation, that we announce the Institute for Biomedical Engineering (IBE) will offer its new postgraduate programmes from 2020,” said IBE director Professor Martin Nieuwoudt.
“Biomedical engineering is a progressive and exciting field aimed at solving health-related problems through multidisciplinary fields such as physics, mathematics, sciences and engineering at the intersections of biology, medicine and health sciences.”
The IBE was established in 2015 in the Faculty of Engineering. As biomedical engineering is inherently multidisciplinary, the IBE has a mandate to work across university faculties including engineering, medicine and health sciences, science, and agri-sciences and institutes within the university, as well as the new School for Data Science and Computational Thinking.
“The medical devices industry has experienced tremendous local and international growth in recent years. The Department of Trade and Industry has also recognised this as a key industry… Within the university there have been noticeable increases in the numbers of requests from multidisciplinary students for new degrees in biomedical engineering.
“At Stellenbosch University, biomedical engineering has historically not been available as a postgraduate degree direction for scientists and medical graduates, only as a research direction within engineering. For this reason, an important mandate of the IBE has been to implement these new degrees. We are in the final-stages of approval and… we only await the SAQA-ID-numbers for the degrees.”
The programmes being offered from 2020 are: a doctoral degree (PhD) in Biomedical Engineering and a Master’s degree in Engineering Science in Biomedical Engineering – Research.
Two more programmes are expected to start in 2021: a Master’s degree in Engineering Science in Biomedical Engineering, and a Postgraduate Diploma in Engineering Science.
“The research scope of the IBE includes, firstly, the development of innovative medical devices that can alleviate the burden of chronic and infectious diseases through early detection, secondly, be used in Fourth Industrial Revolution and/or e-health scenarios and, thirdly, improved diagnostics for resource-poor areas,” Nieuwoudt said.