When he first saw the floor plan for the Department of Biomedical Engineering in NJIT’s new East Building - a swath of conventional cubicles for classrooms and offices - Associate Professor Richard Foulds reached for a pen. Foulds, who confesses to be a repressed architect, knew what he and his colleagues wanted - a layout in which spaces for teaching, research and mentoring students would form a single interactive unit. So, pen in hand, he redrew the plan.

“The architect did a terrific job of implementing our ideas,” says Foulds, an associate professor of biomedical engineering, offering a tour of the department that occupies the sixth floor of the East Building. In the department’s two teaching studios, Foulds and other faculty members are pioneering a new way to educate engineers. With the studio method, students are educated in the fundamentals of engineering not by lecture and recitation, but by hands-on, experiment-based learning. The studio method was first used in architecture schools, Foulds notes, and he and his colleagues have adapted it for engineering.

In an introductory design class, students work in teams to build small robots. One of the robots is programmed to perform angioplasty on pasta; another to perform amniocentesis on a jelly donut; and a third is programmed to reattach the perforated tip of a frankfurter. These imaginative exercises teach the students how to use technology to assist surgeons.

“Our students love studio learning, which has caused enrollment in the biomedical department to mushroom,” says Foulds. “You will never see students asleep in the back of the room.”

Close to the studios are all faculty offices. And it’s not just their professors’ offices that are near the students. There are ten new labs close by, too, where students work with their instructors on research that is advancing biomedical engineering.

In the Human Performance Laboratory, for instance, Professor Michael Lacker is working with students and colleagues to collect data on human motion. They have developed a new method for finding motion solutions, based in math and physics, which can help athletes improve their performance by showing them how best to move their bodies. The method can also help the elderly or individuals of any age whose movement has been affected by various impairments to find comfortable and safe motion, such as a more energy-efficient and stable walk.

In the Motor Control and Rehabilitation Laboratory, there’s a robot known as the HapticMaster. Sergei Adamovich, assistant professor of biomedical engineering, has a research grant from the National Institutes of Health to see if robots and computers can be used to create therapies that help patients relearn movements lost as a result of strokes. Only one other university in the nation -  Northwestern - has a HapticMaster, Adamovich says. A stroke patient with limited movement in his or her arms holds onto the robot’s metal arm, which is programmed to perform repetitive arm exercises. Patients do the exercises with the robot while playing virtual reality games on the computer. The games guide their motions and make the exercises more fun and engaging. Patients can also wear a programmed glove that helps them open their paralyzed fingers.

The Neuromuscular Engineering Laboratory is where Foulds and his students are developing a computer program to help hearing-impaired people communicate. The program is designed to recognize sign language and convert it into spoken English and, conversely, to convert spoken words into animated images that can be displayed on a small computer screen. The ultimate goal is to develop a wearable system, perhaps one small enough to be incorporated into a pair of eyeglasses.         

Tara Alvarez, assistant professor of biomedical engineering, is conducting research in the Vision and Neural Engineering Laboratory that could help people with vision problems such as those associated with learning difficulties. She is studying the brain to understand the control of eye movements and other related motor functions. Alvarez is using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate how motor learning facilitates visual tracking as well as advanced digital signal processing to research neuro-control.

It is research like this that has made biomedical engineering such a success at NJIT - research being conducted in new spaces that enhance the intellectual excitement shared by students and faculty alike.