Biomedical Engineering with Integrated Foundation Year

Biomedical engineering applies the principles and methods of engineering to problems in biology and medicine. It is the discipline that gave us cardiac pacemakers, MRI scanners, prosthetic limbs, drug delivery systems and the diagnostic devices used in hospitals every day, and it continues to produce innovations that transform the diagnosis, treatment and management of disease. Where medicine focuses on understanding and treating illness and engineering focuses on designing reliable systems, biomedical engineering sits precisely at the intersection, combining scientific rigour with the ingenuity to develop technologies that save and improve lives.

At University College London, this five-year full-time programme includes an integrated foundation year, providing a thorough grounding in the sciences and mathematics that underpin the degree before you progress into the engineering programme itself. Across the full five years you will study human biology, physiology, cell and tissue biology, biomechanics, biomaterials, signals and imaging, medical devices, computational modelling and the regulatory frameworks that govern the development and approval of medical technologies. You will develop both the scientific understanding of biological systems and the engineering skills to design, build and test devices that interact with them.

Graduates from biomedical engineering work in the medical device industry, pharmaceutical companies, NHS engineering and clinical technology departments, research institutes and a growing number of digital health and medical technology startups. Many proceed to postgraduate study or doctoral research, where the combination of biological and engineering expertise opens significant research opportunities. The field is growing rapidly as digital technology, materials science and genomics converge with clinical medicine, and professionals with this interdisciplinary training are in increasing demand globally.