Biomaterials is the study of what implants and devices are made of, and of what a living body does to them. The statewide description for the subject covers materials used in prostheses for skin and soft tissue, vascular implant devices, bone repair and artificial joints, and the structure-property relationships of biological tissue.
⚠ The defining idea of the course is that no material is inert. Everything implanted is attacked, encapsulated, corroded or colonised, and most device failures are biological rather than mechanical. That is why the course spends as much time on the host response as on the material.
Carried by three Florida public institutions.
Named on the Biomedical Engineer career path. Biomaterials leads into orthopaedic and cardiovascular device work, dental materials, drug delivery and regenerative medicine, and it is one of the better bridges from this degree into materials and manufacturing roles outside medicine.
⚠⚠ And a word about level, because it applies to every course in this prefix. O*NET reports that only 43% of employers treat a bachelor’s as sufficient for this occupation, against 26% naming a master’s and 13% a doctorate — by a wide margin the highest graduate expectation of any engineering discipline. Choose your upper-level courses with that in mind: the instrumentation, signals and imaging cluster is the most employable at bachelor’s level, while the tissue, neural and BioMEMS cluster largely assumes you intend to continue.
| Number | Title | Carriers |
|---|---|---|
BME3100 | Biomaterials / Biomedical Materials | FAMU, Florida State, Florida Polytechnic |
BME4100 | Biomaterials Science | FAU, FIU |
⚠ Both are upper division, so nothing is lost in transfer — but the numbers have nothing in common, so an evaluator or degree audit matching identifiers will not connect them, and a student searching a catalogue for the wrong one concludes the course is not taught there. Search by subject.
⚠⚠ And the split has a second consequence worth knowing: BME4211 Biomechanics names BME4100 as its statewide prerequisite, which means that gate does not resolve at the three institutions using BME3100. See that course’s guide.
Biomedical engineering is awarded at bachelor’s level by six Florida public institutions in five cities: UF (115 degrees a year), FIU (79), Florida State (36), USF (29), Florida Gulf Coast (21) and Florida A&M (4). Florida State and Florida A&M share the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering, one joint college in Tallahassee, which is why their records in this prefix are identical down to the title.
⚠⚠ UCF and FAU award biomedical engineering at master’s and doctoral level and no bachelor’s at all, and UNF and Florida Polytechnic carry courses in the prefix without awarding the degree. St. Petersburg College is the only Florida College System institution carrying any BME course.
⚠ So a carrier count in this prefix overstates how many independent programmes exist — a course carried by “FAMU and FSU” is one programme’s course. Read anything stated here about content as a description of a small number of specific curricula rather than a Florida-wide norm. The Biomedical Engineer career path sets out what this means for choosing where to study.
This repository checks every course-looking token in a statewide prerequisite against who actually carries that course. The BME prefix returns the worst result measured anywhere in Florida: of 100 active undergraduate records, 75 name at least one course in their prerequisite field, and fifteen of those 75 — one in five — name a course that no Florida public institution carries. The same test on criminal justice returns about 2%.
⚠⚠ The likeliest cause is age, not carelessness. Biomedical engineering is Florida’s newest and fastest-growing engineering discipline; its programmes were built recently and renumbered as they matured, and the statewide record kept the numbers that were proposed, used briefly or retired along the way. The practical consequence is simply that in this prefix you should read the gate from your own institution’s catalogue every time.
⚠⚠ Check that your programme is accredited by ABET’s ENGINEERING Accreditation Commission, not the engineering technology commission — the difference is two extra years of experience toward a Professional Engineer licence, and accreditation attaches to a named programme at a named institution rather than to a course list.
Few biomedical engineers license: device manufacturing falls under the industrial exemption. ⚠ The exception is clinical engineering in hospitals and healthcare facility work. Sit the FE examination in your final year regardless — it is inexpensive as a student and expensive to recreate later. Under s. 471.013(1)(a), Florida Statutes, an approved engineering curriculum needs four years of qualifying experience toward the PE.
Generated September 19, 2026 · Updated September 19, 2026