BioMEMS and microfluidics is engineering at the scale of cells: lab-on-a-chip devices, microfabricated sensors, and the point-of-care diagnostics that put a laboratory test in a clinic or a pocket.
⚠⚠ The defining fact of the subject is that small is qualitatively different, not just smaller. At micron scale the Reynolds number is tiny, so flow is always laminar and two streams meeting in a channel do not mix except by diffusion; surface tension and surface chemistry dominate over gravity and inertia. Most of the early difficulty of this course is unlearning intuition from ordinary fluid mechanics.
Carried by four Florida public institutions.
Named on the Biomedical Engineer career path. It leads into diagnostics and point-of-care device companies, the semiconductor-adjacent microfabrication industry, and pharmaceutical screening. ⚠ The microfabrication skills read well outside medicine — to sensor and semiconductor employers — which is a useful second door from a small occupation.
⚠⚠ 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.
Three carriers title it BioMEMS; FAU calls it Introduction to Microfluidics and BioMEMS, which is the more accurate name, because microfluidics is the larger half of the course everywhere. ⚠⚠ A student searching a catalogue for “microfluidics” will find this course at one institution out of four and miss it at the other three. Search for both terms.
Only four of the six Florida bachelor’s programmes carry this number. Where yours does not, the material is frequently available through mechanical engineering (MEMS), electrical engineering (microfabrication) or chemical engineering (microscale transport). ⚠ Ask rather than assuming the subject is unavailable — the batch of skills is the same wherever it is taught.
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