Bioengineering
About
From the Desk of the Department Chair
Welcome to Penn, home to one of the oldest and most successful bioengineering departments in the United States. Our undergraduate and graduate programs consistently rate among the top 10 in the country.
Bioengineering capitalizes on Penn’s great institutional strengths, including a compact urban campus of 12 separate schools, geographic proximity linking the engineering and medical schools within one city block, and a collaborative, integrated environment that allows students and faculty to transcend disciplines with curricula, research, technology, and patient care.
Penn offers a broad-based, but focused educational experience. Here we encourage you to explore on your own, even as an undergraduate, and enable you to work with world-class faculty and their research programs.
Penn Bioengineering is strongly committed to creating and nurturing an inclusive educational and employment environment that is diverse in race, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, historical tradition, age, religion, parenting status, disability status, veteran status, interests, perspectives and socioeconomic backgrounds.We abide by and embrace the Penn Engineering doctrine for diversity fully and whole-heartedly.
More than 80 percent of our undergraduates perform independent research (about 20 percent of them publish their findings before they graduate), while our graduate students publish their work in the most prestigious scientific journals.
Our graduates work in a variety of careers, including:
- managing research and development in a biotech company
- evaluating new medical technologies for a venture capital firm
- forming start-up companies
- pursuing academic research and teaching
- becoming physicians (careers in medicine are common but not a majority.)
Our students belong to a vast alumni network across the country at companies, health centers, government agencies, and colleges and universities. We welcome you to learn more about us and to visit us in Skirkanich Hall, the state-of-the-art bioengineering center on campus.
Ravi Radhakrishnan, Ph.D.
Professor and Chair
Yearly Research Expenditure
Best graduate degree program in Bioengineering, according to US News
Undergraduate student-to-teacher ratio
Helpful Resources
We are located on the second floor of Skirkanich Hall in room 240.
Research plays a critical role in our undergraduate and graduate programs. The curriculum is designed with research in mind, and allows students the opportunity to participate in research alongside faculty, as part of an independent study, or in conjunction with other departments.
Bioengineering faculty participate in various interdisciplinary research centers and institutes within the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and collaborate with faculty from the medical school and other university departments.
If you have any questions regarding Bioengineering at UPenn, please email us at be@seas.upenn.edu or call us 215-898-8501.
Our History of Reinvention
The first Biomedical Engineering Program in the nation began in the mid-1920s at the University of Pennsylvania, a collaboration between engineers and health professionals.
1953
The first Ph.D. in Bioengineering in the U.S. was awarded by Penn’s Bioengineering Graduate Group.
See the full history
The first Ph.D. in Bioengineering in the U.S. was awarded by Penn’s Bioengineering Graduate Group.
1973
The Department of Bioengineering was formally established at Penn.
See the full history
The Department of Bioengineering was formally established at Penn.
To date, over 450 individuals have received Ph.D.s from Penn’s Bioengineering program, including many distinguished leaders in academia and industry.
Today, Penn’s Bioengineering department has 22 primary faculty members and over 212 affiliated graduate group faculty who provide core teaching and research for more than 200 undergraduates and over 500 graduate students.
The department consistently ranks among the best Bioengineering programs in the U.S., preparing students for careers in industry, medicine, academia, and biomedical technology.