Beginning next fall, undergraduates will have the option of selecting two new majors in areas that have drawn increasing student interest: biomedical engineering and ethnicity, race & migration. Both majors, which are interdisciplinary in scope, were recently approved by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
"I welcome these two new majors, which will significantly enrich the offerings of Yale College," says Richard H. Brodhead, dean of Yale College. "The biomedical engineering major will bring existing strengths of Yale together in important new conjunctions. The major in ethnicity, race & migration will take advantage of notable, recent scholarly work and is especially impressive in its comparatist and international emphases."
Biomedical Engineering
The new biomedical engineering BME major is an interdepartmental major within the Faculty of Engineering that will allow students to study life sciences as part of their training as engineers. BME is an important addition to engineering studies, according to members of a faculty committee that proposed the new major, because of the increasingly significant role of engineering methods and strategies in addressing "many important biomedical problems, ranging from studies of physiological function using images, to the development of artificial organs and new biomaterials."
A $750,000 grant from the Whitaker Foundation, an organization that promotes biotechnology in the United States, as well as the donation of teaching equipment and computers from Hewlett Packard for a new teaching laboratory, made the BME major possible, says Robert Apfel, the Robert Higgin Professor of Mechanical Engineering and a member of the BME committee. The biomedical engineering laboratory course is being offered as part of the major for student experimentation.
Faculty for the BME major will be drawn from the Faculty of Engineering and the School of Medicine, according to D. Allen Bromley, dean of engineering and Sterling Professor of the Sciences. "This new program allows us to take advantage of the synergism that already exists between engineering and the medical school," he says. "We are unique at Yale because of the great amount of interaction we already have."
In fact, most of the courses that make up the new major are already offered to undergraduates, but BME is a more "extensive and formal" program, according to Werner Wolf, director of educational affairs for engineering and the chair and Raymond J. Wean Professor of Applied Physics. "We've really needed a program such as this for some time," he says.
In addition to prerequisite courses in math, chemistry, biology and physics, students majoring in BME will take nine other courses, at least three of which must be in one of three tracks: medical imaging, biomechanics or biotechnology. To fulfill the major, students are also required to enroll in two courses in the life sciences and take a full year of biomedical engineering laboratory, where they can apply some of their knowledge. Students will also participate in a senior seminar and complete a senior essay.
Ethnicity, Race & Migration
Ethnicity, race & migration ER&M , which will be offered only as a second major, will enable students to explore issues and concepts of ethnicity, nationality, race and culture, as well as global migrations. Students who select the ER&M major will undertake an "interdisciplinary, comparative study of forces that have created a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic and multi-racial world," wrote members of the committee that proposed the program to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
"The program has grown from both student interest and activism for ethnic studies and faculty interest," says Michael Denning, professor of American studies and chair of the ER&M committee.
In the past decade, ethnic studies has been an area of concentration within the American studies program, Professor Denning says. With its new status as a second major, ER&M "will have a more serious place in undergraduate education and will allow new kinds of work and thinking for both faculty and students," he notes.
Courses will be taught by faculty in the departments of history, American studies, anthropology, political science, African and African-American studies, psychology, women's studies, international studies, sociology, economics, and Spanish and Portuguese, among others.
In addition to fulfilling the requirements of a first major, students in ER&M must complete 12 term courses, including the senior seminar and the senior essay. Six of these courses, including the senior essay, can be in an area of concentration of the student's choice; all course selections are required to be approved by the director of undergraduate studies. All undergraduates are required to take the course "Introduction to Ethnicity, Race and Migration" and must take two courses in each of two distinct geographical areas. In addition, they must take at least one course from each of the four subfields within the major: theoretical perspectives, structures of international migration, politics and economics of ethnicity, and history and cultures of peoples.