The first thing you notice about Dr. Banu Onaral's office is that she needs two desks pushed together. This is not so surprising when you take into account her charge as director of Drexel's School of Biomedical Science, Engineering, and Health Systems. The challenge of initiating research opportunities, coordinating various departments, and educating undergraduate and graduate students in engineering's most constantly changing and groundbreaking field would require no fewer than two desks.

Onaral is no stranger to the cutting edge of engineering. This past president of the Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society has been linked to engineering her entire life. She is the daughter of one of Turkey's first generation of engineers educated after the founding of the Turkish Republic and she was born, fittingly enough, the same year as the invention of the transistor.

But transistors marked a past revolution in engineering. The future points to the area of biomedical engineering. "We are about to learn how to do many things that nature is able to do through its evolutionary process," says Onaral. "Many new industries are forming around cellular and tissue engineering and bioinformatics and genomics. Yes, the human genome - our individual genetic map - has been coded, but there is still tremendous opportunity to turn that information into technologies and new industries."

Dr. Onaral is carving Drexel's niche in this competitive field through a unique multidisciplinary approach and an aggressive formation of alliances. "The school was created because we had enough strengths within the University - such as the resources of the College of Engineering - and alliances with regional hospitals such as MCP Hahnemann to initiate research projects that individual faculty or small research groups couldn't handle. We have the technology to design, build, and integrate devices, such as those used for minimally invasive surgery, and then coordinate with medical partners."

This approach has worked well. The school is currently involved in research areas as diverse as biomedical sensing and imaging, cellular and tissue engineering, human performance engineering (including neuroengineering), and functional bioinformatics and computational biomedicine. Research is made possible by the school's 11 fully equipped laboratories.

The school's diversity of research is directly reflected in its academic approach. "Our niche is in integrative biomedical systems engineering. Our students are exposed to the social and economic aspects of engineering through case studies."

It is this awareness of the many aspects of biomedical science and engineering that separates Drexel's program from other university programs. A diverse, truly multidisciplinary science, biomedical science and engineering demands the resources and dedicated faculty that Drexel's School of Biomedical Science, Engineering, and Health Systems provides.

"We are defining our own place. My aspiration is that we will be known as The Drexel Biomed Group, different from research centers in other parts of the country," Onaral states confidently. "This is who we are and how we work. We have a synergistic approach to things. It's a new way of educating and a university such as Drexel is perfectly poised to be a leader in this area."