August 27, 2021
The newly renovated BME Commons, teaching, learning, teamwork, collaboration and ideation space is poised to welcome the BME community back to campus this fall.
This fall, after over a year of virtual meetings, distance learning, and remote activities, BME is delighted to welcome students, faculty and staff back to campus to get a first look at the newly renovated 14,000 square foot experiential learning, teaching, design, and collaboration spaces in the Lurie Biomedical Engineering Building. The project costing over $4 million began construction in January 2020 and was completed through the pandemic in March of 2021. This will be the first time most of our students and faculty will get to utilize the brand new spaces for their coursework and research endeavors. The renovation was introduced with a virtual tour on YouTube by the project lead and BME Professor Jan Stegemann earlier this year.
Several key features of the newly designed spaces include:
- Open and welcoming spaces for socializing, building community
- Structured and technology-equipped areas for ideation, collaboration, teamwork
- Enhanced prototyping, fabrication, and testing spaces
- Specialized spaces for enhanced training and learning
- New instructional labs for biomechanics, biotechnology, instrumentation
- Flexible classroom for lecture, active learning, and seminar formats
- Infrastructure for co-curricular student groups
The goals of the new space are to foster teamwork and community, integrate professional practice into BME curriculum, and promote engineering / industry / medicine interactions. “We’re excited to debut these outstanding design and maker spaces, which were created specifically to enhance experiential learning for biomedical engineering students and faculty.” – Jan Stegemann, Ph.D., BME Associate Chair for Master’s Education, Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Project Lead.
The link to the new BME Design Spaces website is: http://sites.google.com/umich.edu/bmedesignspaces
A large highly configurable classroom space offers opportunities for instruction in lecture, active learning, and seminar configurations. Photo: Brandon Baier
