Dr. Bellamkonda started the Town Hall by introducing
himself as the Chair of the Biomedical Engineering
Department. His goal as Department Chair is to make
the Walter H. Coulter Department of Biomedical
Engineering the best program in the nation, but he
acknowledges that many improvements need to be
made. One of the many questions that has been raised
about BME is if we are engineers who study in depth
or in breadth. Dr. Bellamkonda believes that our ability
to expand our process of thinking from one proposed
problem is the best gift we have. We constantly digest
a diverse range of information, find connections, and
make it whole in order to solve real-world issues. We
work hard, constantly shake off failures, and graduate
with a valuable set of analysis and problem solving
skills. In his career, he has noticed that it is not the brightest people who are successful, but
the people who have internal motivation. He believes that those who succeed at BME are
students that have internal rather than external motivators.
Dr. Bellamkonda proceeded to answer questions from our RSVP form. The first question
regarded the change in curriculum and the motivators for this change. He broke down his
response into two driving forces. The first was the lack of resources the department has in
order to sustain BMED 1300 as well as assure the quality of instruction. Some facilitators
were teaching up to six teams each semester! He also noticed that only 40% of students
who had taken 1300 were graduating with a BME degree; he feels that the faculty resources
and time could be allocated more efficiently. His second reason was the lack of preparation
undergraduate students felt while taking BMED 2210, 3300, and 3510. By the time they
reached these classes, students had a wide range of experiences which did not assure
every student could succeed in these courses. By moving 2210 up in the pre-requisite
chain, he hopes to make the undergraduate BME experience more uniform and expose
students to engineering concepts earlier in the curriculum.
The second question also addressed the changes to the curriculum and asked whether the
professional field merited these changes. Dr. Bellamkonda insisted that all changes that are
made in the BME department are not to meet the demands of industry. In fact, the BME
department does not approach industry and ask questions regarding the curriculum. His top
priority to to make sure we are fundamentally engineers and that are undergraduates are
indulged in the engineering experience while learning the appropriate problem solving skill
sets an engineer needs to succeed in industry. He has received a lot of positive feedback
from Georgia Tech alumnus; for example, he has heard that the problem-based learning
style has been similar to company meetings.
The third question addressed his plans for building a stronger BME community. He
acknowledges that many institutions and colleges around the nation measure this by
advertising their student to faculty ratio. For the BME department at Georgia Tech, the ratio
is atrocious; he is working to resolve this problem. However, he feels that we have many
department resources as well as student groups, such as bmedSAB and the MentorMentee program, that provide many avenues of communication between students and
faculty members. Dr. Bellamkonda has seen many improvements throughout the years,
such as the Learning Commons initiative, but he is open to more ideas to address this
issue.
A student asked how the BME department at Georgia Tech stays current and innovative in
the rapidly advancing and growing field of medicine. He addresses this question by
recognizing that many undergraduate and graduate school rankings are based on the rate
of funding, the progress of research, and the success of our faculty. He is proud to say that
we are doing very well as a department. We have the highest NIH funding, we are one of
the top graduate schools for BME, and we have high achieving faculty members who are
recognized worldwide.
Another student continued down this line of question and asked how the BME department
deals with the tension between research and instruction, especially when it comes to
recruiting faculty to teach each semester. Dr. Bellamkonda has set aside a budget that
professors can access to find their research if and only if they instruct more undergraduate
and graduate classes. Many professors have applied for these funds, and Dr. Bellamkonda
believes this has had a huge impact in the past few years. He has also seen that the
professors who have high research productivity instruct more classes. That said, he
encouraged all BME undergraduates to continue filling out the Course Instructor Opinion
Survey (CIOS), as those surveys have a huge impact on the decisions the department
makes when recruiting instructors.
A member of the audience asked how the new building, the Engineered Biosystems
Building (EBB), will impact the BME department. Because of this new building, the
department is able to hire more instructors in Whitaker. Dr. Bellamkonda stated that the
largest constraint to faculty hiring is space. He is hoping to hire four more faculty members.
The EBB will be able to house many BME labs that can work in conjunction with other labs
that are researching some of the same concepts. He hopes that the collaboration can lead
to more exciting innovations in the future.