Bio/Medical Engineer
Sarah is a biomedical engineer. She has a bachelor's degree and is a qualified Professional Engineer, but unlike her colleagues in other fields of engineering, she has taken an interest in biology. Biomedical engineers design systems and instruments that will interact with living organisms. Sarah works for a company that manufactures medical equipment such as surgical tools, monitoring devices and scanners that are used to diagnose diseases.
Sarah works in the company's research department. She usually concentrates on a single project, which can take many years to complete. Biomedical engineers specialize in particular areas of medicine, and must combine medical and biological knowledge with an understanding of mathematics and mechanics to create new products to help improve medical care.
Sarah begins the day in her office, reading through some new research that has been published in medical journals, and answering emails and phone messages to medical professionals, people in other departments within the company and to her fellow biomedical engineers. Communicating with doctors and medical researchers is an important part of her day. She is currently working on a project involving tissue engineering, which is at the forefront of medical research. She is helping to design an artificial kidney that she hopes will one day be used instead of a transplanted organ or dialysis.
She has a meeting with other members of the team, some of whom join the meeting by phone. They discuss their progress and talk about the new research, which most of them have already read. Biomedical engineers usually work in research and therefore need to keep up to date with the latest developments.
Sarah visits her lab after lunch to check on some ongoing research. She spends most of the rest of the day in the lab making sure that the experiment is proceeding to plan, and collecting some results. Before she goes home, she returns to her office to go over the days work and sends an email to the rest of the team to let them know that the results are looking good.
