Cell and Tissue Engineering is the attempt to build living replacement tissue — cells, scaffolds and the signals that persuade them to organise into something that works. It is the research frontier of the discipline and the part of it that appears in the news.
⚠⚠ It is also the part where the honest picture is furthest from the headlines. A handful of engineered tissues are in clinical use; most of the field is laboratory research, and the course should be taken with that in mind. That is a reason to plan on graduate study if this is what interests you, not a reason to avoid it.
Carried by four Florida public institutions.
Named on the Biomedical Engineer career path. It leads into regenerative medicine and cell-therapy companies, pharmaceutical and biotechnology research, and academic research — and it is the most common reason biomedical engineering graduates go on to a doctorate.
⚠⚠ 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.
FAMU and Florida State carry a 1-credit BME4332L Cell and Tissue Engineering Laboratory; FIU and FAU do not. Where it exists it is normally a corequisite, so register for both — and the laboratory is the valuable half here, because aseptic technique and cell culture are hands-on skills that cannot be learned from a lecture and that employers and graduate supervisors both look for.
FAMU, Florida State and FIU use the statewide title; FAU calls it Tissue Engineering: Basic Concepts. ⚠ Branding rather than divergence — but FAU’s “basic concepts” is a fair signal that its version is a survey, so if you are choosing electives for graduate preparation, ask how much laboratory work is involved.
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