Immersive Experiences

Over the course of the 2016-17 academic year, the ECBE department developed a partnership with the Biomedical Acceleration and Commercialization Center (BACC) at Albany Medical College and the affiliated hospital, Albany Medical Center that allowed 6 rising seniors to rotate through different clinical departments and identify problems that could be addressed by new or better biomedical devices. The pilot program was a resounding success with students identifying over 200 needs through their observations at the hospital. From the students’ perspective, the experience gave them a “behind the scenes” opportunity to interact with medical doctors and staff at the largest medical center in the region.

Since then the program has developed to provide students with over 20 days in the clinic based on students’ expressed desire to spend more time making observations in each area of the hospital. This past summer students rotated through seven different areas at the hospital: Operating Room, Gastroenterology, Interventional Radiology, ENT, Plastic Surgery, and the Emergency Department. We have also partnered with Sunnyview Rehabilitation Center and Consumer Directed Choices. At the end of the program, students engage in an intensive process to identify the post promising problems that they will tackle as part of their two term BME capstone sequence.

In the summer of 2019, the ECBE department received a grant from the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering for their project “SCIP, HOP & JUMP: Summer Clinical Immersion Program, Hands on Prototyping, and Jump-Starting Design Projects Towards Translation”. This will further strengthen Union College's Summer Clinical Immersion Program (SCIP) through a collaboration with the Albany Medical College’s Biomedical Acceleration and Commercialization Center (AMC/BACC). Following the clinical immersion experience, biomedical engineering majors will be offered enhanced hands-on prototyping (HOP) opportunities for solution iteration in tandem with close faculty and industry mentorship and guest lecturers from topical area experts through the expanded, two-term Capstone Design Course Sequence. Finally, students enrolled in the two-term enhanced Capstone Design experience will be provided with a launchpad to jump-start translation (JUMP) through the refining of their solutions and prototypes through the spring term to further explore commercialization of their medical devices.

In the summer of 2022, the Sternlicht family made a generous gift to support the program. The Beno Sternlicht (1950) Fund for Student Learning in Innovation provides provides annual support for eight BME students. It also supports stipends for faculty mentors and clinical partnership fees. This gift enables our transformational program to continue to impact our BME student experience both inside and outside the classroom.

The SAE Aero Teams design an airplane from scratch and compete against other teams from other national and international universities and colleges. ECBE students have designed and constructed different systems on the plane ranging from landing gear to controls to payload management.

The Baja team designs an all terrain vehicle to compete against other national and international universities and colleges. ECBE students have designed and constructed different elements of the vehicle over the year with a focus on the electrical elements of the vehicle.