Engineering Now 2009
 
 

Biological Systems Engineering (BSE)

The fee will help BSE reach its top-five goal

When the Department of Biological Systems Engineering (BSE) learned that they would be receiving income from the College of Engineering's engineering fees, Saied Mostaghimi, department head, knew immediately how he could best serve his undergraduates.  BSE would now have its own unit operations lab, previously conducted in five different locations, and an instrumentation lab.

The entire first floor of Agnew Hall, adjacent to Seitz Hall where BSE is located, received a much-needed facelift, providing the undergraduates with the types of facilities that the top 10  BSE departments in the country already have.  Since Virginia Tech's BSE department has already moved to seventh for the quality of its graduate program in the 2009 U.S. News & World Report survey, up from its previous ranking of 12th in the U.S., Mostaghimi said he expects that enhancement of BSE's teaching laboratories will help realize the department's vision of ranking among the top five U.S. programs. “Facilities and equipment have been our problem, and now the engineering fee is providing the opportunity to address that,” he said.

For the first time in the history of the department “we are now able to designate a  'wet' teaching laboratory customized to meet the needs of our students, which we could not have accomplished without these additional funds,” he added.  “The engineering fee is a godsend.”

The new unit operations facility provides BSE students with the ability to learn about bioprocess engineering in small groups using new equipment.  They might use the bioreactor for fermentation or work with proteins for use in bio-pharmaceuticals.  “When we were in five locations and using research equipment to teach, we had to employ several graduate teaching assistants to help all of the students,” Mostaghimi said.

“And since we never had an instrumentation lab for our students, we were sending them to mechanical engineering and engineering science and mechanics (ESM) to take instrumentation courses where the content was not suitable for BSE students. When the instrumentation lab was cross-listed with ESM, our students found it to be an unhappy marriage,” explained Kumar Mallikarjunan, associate professor of BSE.  ESM Professor Muhammad Hajj “deserves high accolades for trying several scenarios to manage the course, but when he tried to include the needs of the BSE students, then he could not cover what his ESM students needed.”

“We pulled the instrumentation course apart to decide what our BSE students really need, what they have to monitor, and what do they have to control,” Mallikarjunan said.  The large industries that employ BSE students are looking for employees who have “specific skill sets” when it comes to dealing with biological systems.  “Biology often fights back,” and there can often be false positives, he added.

“We need students who can work with the instrumentation.  They need to know why something doesn't work, how to fix it, and how to evaluate different pieces of equipment.  This can only be done with hands-on methods,” Mallikarjunan said. 

“Our instrumentation course focus is on the development  of biosensors for rapid measurements in complex biological       systems.  An example might be micro-electric-mechanical (MEMS) based biosensors for detecting foul odors in a bioprocessing facility or a microfluidics type DNA-based biosensors for detecting pathogenic bacteria in food or in water,” Mostaghimi said.  “As an emerging field, biosensors development has a wide range of opportunities for BSE graduates and we would like to get them ready for such challenges.”

The BSE program is enjoying renewed popularity among engineering students, with its undergraduate class almost tripling in the past few years and its graduate enrollment moving from about 20 in 2003 to approximately 65 today, most of whom are doctoral candidates.

The BSE program “brings engineering to life” by combining biological sciences and engineering. The undergraduate program focuses on two areas of bioprocess engineering and land and water resources engineering. The engineering fee has enabled BSE to develop the badly needed facilities for its undergraduate students.  Future plans include purchasing new teaching equipment for the department's wet teaching laboratory. “We strive to provide world-class education and training to engineers who use their talents to make our world a better place,” Mostaghimi said.