When John White was an undergraduate at Louisiana Tech University, he enrolled as a chemical engineer. It was a practical choice for what was available at the time, but didn’t feel like the right one. By chance, Louisiana Tech had recently started one of the first accredited biomedical engineering programs at a public university in the United States.
White jumped into it, and the direction of his career shifted. “I fell in love with the idea of applying engineering approaches to healthcare,” he says.
That feeling has defined the decades since: a PhD in neural engineering at Johns Hopkins University studying hearing, balance, and ultimately learning and memory; a faculty career that led to the directorship of the Brain Institute at the University of Utah; and then 10 years as the chair of biomedical engineering at Boston University, one of the largest BME programs in North America, with 60 faculty, 650 undergraduates, and 250 graduate students.
Now White is in Victoria, leading the Faculty of Engineering and Computer Science’s Biomedical Engineering (BME) program, and he is clear about why.
Biomedical engineering is going to be one of the great growth areas in engineering in the 21st century in Canada. We are roughly where the United States was in 1990, when the number of accredited programs was just beginning to take off.”
—John White
Biomedical engineering differs from mechanical or electrical disciplines
A common question from prospective students is whether a biomedical engineering degree offers something meaningfully different from a mechanical or electrical engineering degree with a biology minor. White’s answer is direct: “A biomedical engineer has been trained specifically to apply engineering principles to biological systems—to understand them, or to fix them,” he says. “That is not something you acquire as an add-on.”
This distinction becomes clear when the stakes are high. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the mRNA vaccine represented one of the most significant technological achievements of the era. The underlying science came from chemists and biologists. But manufacturing a vaccine that could be approved, produced at scale, and delivered globally within months was an engineering challenge that required those who understood both the biology, and the regulatory, safety, and manufacturing constraints unique to medicine.
“Many of the engineers who do device design come from mechanical or electrical backgrounds,” White acknowledges. “But biomedical engineering graduates bring something specific: they know how to communicate with clinicians and healthcare professionals, they understand regulatory affairs, and their commitment to healthcare is primary, not secondary.”
The regulatory work is something that White intends to emphasize at UVic. This fall, he will teach the program’s biomedical devices course and plans to add new material to the already existing content on safety and regulatory approval. “Getting regulatory approval is not a box you check at the end of a project,” he says. “It should shape every design decision from the very beginning.”
Biomedical engineering trends: wearables, AI diagnostics, and tissue engineering
White describes the current moment in biomedical engineering as one of exciting change and great possibility, but also one requiring careful navigation.
Wearable health technology provides a key example. “We have to be ready to monitor people’s health in ways that are safe, respectful of their privacy, and inexpensive,” he says. “That is especially important in a province like BC, where a large number of people live far from a major hospital.” Consumer devices now routinely perform functions once confined to clinical settings, which is a development with significant implications for how healthcare is delivered to geographically dispersed and underserved populations, who may also be the most wary of the technology.
At the same time, the combination of high-tech industry culture and medical regulation can create friction. “We are in a period of rapid advances, and there is genuine tension between a high-tech economy that wants zero regulation and a medical field that is highly regulated for good reason,” White says. “We need processes that can move quickly while protecting patient data.”
In the longer term, tissue engineering and bio-based therapies represents one of the field’s most transformative frontiers. UVic researchers including Karolina Valente, Mohsen Akbari and Stephanie Willerth are active in this area, working toward the ability to grow and use biological cells and tissues for testing, repair and replacement. “The day will come when patients with osteoarthritis can receive a replacement meniscus grown from their own stem cells—or eventually, entire organs,” White says. “It will take time, but the progress is real.”
How co-op gives UVic biomedical engineering students an edge
One of the features that drew White to UVic was the engineering program’s mandatory and automatic co-op component, where all students complete 16 months of co-op work experience as part of gaining their degree. “When I saw what UVic students could do in a short design project, they were clearly outperforming students at other institutions without co-op,” he says. “It is not subtle.”
The program has built close ties with local industry partners including Starfish Medical, a Victoria-based medical device company. Third and fourth-year students are increasingly securing placements that provide genuine engineering experience before graduation.
White also sees the co-op program as part of a larger story about the field’s momentum in Canada. In the United States, a critical mass of biomedical engineering graduates entering the industry around 2,000 transformed how companies understood and recruited from the discipline. Canada is approaching a similar inflection point. “The need is clearly there,” White says. “We are at the beginning of that shift, and students coming through this program now will be among the people who define what BME looks like in this country.”
How UVic is preparing biomedical engineering students for an AI-driven future
White is thinking carefully about what it means to train engineers for a profession that will be increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence, and he finds reason to be cautiously optimistic when thinking about the nature of the biomedical engineering field itself.
“AI tools are going to be powerful, and they will be usable for good and for harm,” he says. “Students who are in school now will be using AI in their professional practice. We all need to think seriously about how to prepare them for that.”
The tight regulatory environment of biomedical engineering, he notes, provides a counterpoint to the risks that rapid AI adoption poses in other, less-constrained sectors.
We are a highly regulated field, and that is genuinely a good thing when it comes to AI. It pushes the technology in the direction of human-centred, ethical design—which is the direction it needs to go.”
—John White
Curriculum planning in the faculty is already oriented around these questions. White notes that there are active discussions in the department about how to give students the flexibility to pursue their interests while ensuring the degree remains rigorous and response to where the field and the job market are heading.
Biomedical engineering programs in Canada: a field set to grow
Canada currently has eight standalone biomedical engineering programs. The United States has 181. White’s move from Boston to Victoria is not, in his framing, a departure from the centre of the field, but a bet on where the centre is going. He keeps a slide for his first-year students that charts the exponential growth in accredited biomedical engineering programs in the US starting around 1990. Canada’s per-capita position today closely maps onto that earlier moment.
“A number of new programs are forming across the country,” he says. “UVic’s is among the first in western Canada. The growth is coming.”
His own path here included a personal draw, as his wife grew up in Manitoba and returning to Canada had long been a part of their plans. But when this opportunity arrived, he says, it was the professional pull that made the decision for him. “I was genuinely intrigued by the idea of helping grow this field in Canada,” he says. “There is real potential here, and I wanted to be part of what comes next.”
