Neural Engineering is the engineering of interfaces with the nervous system — recording from neurons, stimulating them, and building devices that do something useful with the result. Cochlear implants, deep brain stimulation, neuroprosthetics and brain-computer interfaces all sit here.
⚠ It is one of the few areas where the discipline delivers what the public imagines it does. Cochlear implants and deep brain stimulators are in routine clinical use and have changed lives at scale, which makes this a course where the engineering and the motivation are unusually easy to connect.
Carried by four Florida public institutions.
Named on the Biomedical Engineer career path. It leads into the neuromodulation industry — a substantial and growing device sector — and into neuroscience and neuroengineering research. ⚠ It is also one of the most graduate-school-oriented courses in the degree, and the research groups that hire in this area recruit heavily from students who have done undergraduate research.
⚠⚠ 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, Florida State, FAU and UF all carry this number at 3 credits under the identical title Neural Engineering. ⚠ That is rare agreement in a prefix where almost nothing else lines up, and it makes this course unusually safe to plan around and to transfer.
Of everything in this course, the safe-stimulation material is the part with immediate professional consequence. Charge density limits, charge balance and electrode dissolution are what separate a stimulator that works for fifteen years from one that damages tissue, and they are governed by well-established limits that a device engineer is expected to know. If you take one thing from this course into an interview, make it this.
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