PhD in Bioengineering

The Biomedical Devices and Bioimaging track reflects Northeastern University’s outstanding research profile in developing new technologies for visualizing biological processes and disease.  Our department has active federally funded research spanning a broad spectrum of relevant areas in instrument design, contrast agent development, and advanced computational modeling and reconstruction methods. Example research centers include the Institute for the Chemical Imaging of Living Systems, the Translational Biophotonics Cluster, and the B-SPIRAL signal processing group.

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Motion, deformation, and flow of biological systems in response to applied loads elicit biological responses at the molecular and cellular levels that support the physiological function of tissues and organs and drive their adaptation and remodeling. To study these complex interactions, principles of solid, fluid, and transport mechanics must be combined with measures of biological function. The Biomechanics, Biotransport, & Mechanobiology track embraces this approach and leverages the strong expertise of Northeastern faculty attempting to tie applied loads to biological responses at multiple length and time scales.
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Principles for engineering living cells and tissues are essential to address many of the most significant biomedical challenges facing our society today. These application areas include engineering biomaterials to coax and enable stem cells to form functional tissue or to heal damaged tissue; designing vehicles for delivering genes and therapeutics to reach specific target cells to treat a disease; and, uncovering therapeutic strategies to curb pathological cell behaviors and tissue phenotypes. At a more fundamental level, the field is at the nascent stages of understanding how cells make decisions in complex microenvironments and how cells interact with each other and their surrounding environment to organize into complex three-dimensional tissues. Advances will require a multiscale experimental, computational and theoretical approaches spanning molecular-cellular-tissue levels and integration of molecular and physical mechanisms, including the role of mechanical forces.
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View more about Molecular, Cell, and Tissue Engineering track

We aim to understand the rules governing emergent systems-level behavior and to use these rules to rationally engineer biological systems. We make quantitative measurements, often at the single-cell level, to test different conceptual frameworks and discriminate amongst different classes of models. Our faculty are leaders in developing and applying both theoretical methods, e.g., control theory, and experimental methods, e.g., single-cell proteomics by mass-spec, to biological systems.  At the organ and tissue levels, 3D scans acquired through medical imaging methods (e.g. US, CT, MRI, etc.) may be used to reconstruct virtual models of targeted systems. Non-invasive measures of the physiological function can then inform numerical simulations to predict the behavior of biological systems over time, with the goal of estimating the progression towards pathological endpoints or to test the efficacy of targeted surgical procedures and pharmaceutical treatments (e.g., drug delivery).
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