Pritzker Institute Director Candidate, Jie Liang

Sensors, Measurements, Big Data, Modeling, and Computing: Opportunities and Challenges in Improving Human Health

Rapidly evolving biomedical sensors will soon provide multi-scale and constant measurement of molecular, cellular, tissue, and whole-body events at fine spatial-temporal resolution. They will fundamentally change how we improve and manage health. We discuss the challenges and opportunities from the critical accumulation of the resulting big data and examine how to integrate biomedical engineering research with basic research across diverse disciplines of biosciences, physical and chemical sciences, mathematics, and computational sciences. We examine how this multidisciplinary approach can enable discoveries of new disease mechanisms, formulation of novel diagnostics and therapeutics, as well as development of devices and algorithms to maintain and improve health. We also discuss how to develop a new generation of biomedical engineering talents who can make important contributions throughout this new endeavor and how to reach out to the general society we serve with maximized impact.