Scott Delp's business card, which sports an image of Eadweard Muybridge’s 1878 photo of Leland Stanford’s trotting horse, speaks to his passion for his lifework. The associate professor and co-chair of the biomechanical division of the department of mechanical engineering has long been fascinated by the beauty of movement, and much of his research aims to improve muscle function in limbs deformed by cerebral palsy.
As a graduate student, Delp, MS ’87, PhD ’90, latched onto Gene Bleck, a specialist in the treatment of movement disorders at the School of Medicine. When he wasn’t in class, Delp would cross the street to watch Bleck examine patients or follow him into the operating room.
“By chance I met this guy who was the world guru in the field and whose brother was an engineer, so he somehow thought engineers were smart,” Delp recalls. “But as far as I knew, I was the only engineer at the Medical Center.”
Although Delp was able to cobble together courses that suited his interests and skills, he wants to spare future generations of bioengineers the trouble. “I randomly grabbed whatever classes I could, but we can certainly make that educational process less ad hoc and more streamlined,” he says. “I think one of the key goals of the new department will be defining a world-class, coordinated program.”
Delp is referring to the new department of bioengineering that is scheduled to begin admitting graduate students in the fall of 2003 and undergrads by 2005. A joint venture of the schools of engineering and medicine, it will bring together some of the sharpest intellects on campus to work on such challenges as aging and environmental sustainability. “If Stanford is to remain one of the top research universities in the world, it must tackle these problems aggressively and strategically,” wrote Philip Pizzo, dean of the School of Medicine, and Jim Plummer, dean of the School of Engineering, in an announcement in June.
Of the top five engineering schools in the United States, Stanford is the only one without a department of bioengineering. But Plummer, MS ’67, PhD ’71, notes that a significant number of faculty in mechanical engineering, chemical engineering, materials science, and civil and environmental engineering have collaborated with faculty at the Medical School for years on research in bone growth, cardiovascular flow, imaging, neural signal processing and medical robotics. For a long time, he says, he was not convinced that a separate interdisciplinary department was needed. Then came the revolution in biological sciences.
“Engineers need to be able to write equations, develop models and do computer simulations,” Plummer says. “And what finally got us to the point of strongly believing that we should form a bioengineering department was the fact that the discipline of biology in the last 10 years has become more amenable to engineering measurements and quantifications of living things at all scale levels, from genes all the way up to organs and full systems.”
The developments in the biological sciences mean that researchers in his school can now engineer living systems, from replacement organs to new kinds of prosthetic devices, Plummer says. “They can work in harmony with the body, as opposed to putting artificial materials into the body.”
Pizzo emphasizes that the new department will be strongly committed not only to interdisciplinary research but also to undergraduate and graduate education. As a result, he says, “there will be a new generation of individuals who will think about the connections between engineering, biology and science—and their fusion—early in their college careers and through graduate school, with some of them perhaps getting medical degrees.”
At press time, Pizzo and Plummer were launching searches for a department chair and approximately 20 faculty members. “The majority of hires will be junior faculty—brand-new assistant professors who have creative ideas,” the engineering dean says. “We’re really looking for a new kind of person, who has a fairly deep understanding of biology and living systems, and also a strong engineering background.”
Delp notes that when he taught at Northwestern University, his lab in the biomedical engineering department was housed at the teaching hospital. “The clinical and basic sciences departments were separated by 15 miles there; and at Cornell, they’re separated by 200 miles,” he says. By contrast, the proximity of the schools of engineering and medicine at Stanford will serve students and faculty well. “Students could go to clinical rounds at 7:30 a.m. (if you can get them out of bed), take engineering classes in the afternoon and work in biology labs in the evening,” he says. “It’s very hard to do that in other settings.”
In his own work in computer-assisted surgery and computational neuroscience—he uses high-performance computers to model how the nervous system coordinates movement—Delp says the people he most frequently talks with are orthopedists, neurologists, radiologists and surgeons. “I would be lost without a medical school.”
