The IEEE EMBS Student Mentoring Program (SMP) 2024 is one of the most remarkable programs within the IEEE EMBS Student Activities Committee (SAC). The program was revamped in 2021 with the aims of creating mentoring partnerships between EMBS student members and its professionals and promoting the skills and professional development of students and young professionals in society. After successfully launching for three consecutive years, the SMP 2024 edition involved more participants than the previous editions, with 88 mentee-mentor pairs and 16 appointed ambassadors. As a global program, the 2024 edition involved all 10 IEEE regions, with mentees and mentors coming from 35 and 28 countries, respectively. The program enriches society by producing excellent mentees who receive academic and professional guidance from experienced mentors. According to the program outcomes, mentees report improved academic and leadership skills, as well as personal and professional development. Some mentees grasped opportunities in the program to launch biomedical engineering (BME) projects with their mentors and to join and present at prestigious international conferences. In addition, the post-program survey results show participants’ high interest in the upcoming editions. Thus, alongside mentees’ notable achievements, this article highlights how the SMP 2024 edition empowers society through mentorship.
Florida Atlantic University has established a new Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME) to educate a diverse workforce at the intersection of engineering, medicine, biology, and artificial intelligence. This article introduces the department’s educational vision, curriculum, and state-of-the-art laboratories designed to support experiential learning and clinical translation. By embedding AI throughout undergraduate and graduate tracks, the program provides students with practical, cross-disciplinary research opportunities. Additionally, the article highlights the department’s primary research centers, illustrating how active collaborations among engineering, medicine, and industry advance biomedical discovery and healthcare technologies to address emerging global health challenges.
A surgical tracking system, called vision-integrated surgical tracking assistance (VISTA), is being developed to use neural radiance fields (NeRFs) to take the current pre-operative computed tomography (CT) scan and video from the surgeon’s 2-D endoscope and generate a quickly updated, 3-D view of the sinus surgery field as the surgeon removes tissue. The goal is to make standard sinus surgery procedures more precise and effective, and reduce the need for follow-up surgeries.
Current allergy treatments manage symptoms but rarely address the underlying immune response. This article explores how nanoparticle and mRNA-based therapies could retrain the immune system to tolerate allergens safely and precisely. While early research shows promising results, significant clinical testing and development are still needed before these therapies reach patients.
Airway disease management is undergoing a structural transformation. For decades, asthma was treated as a single condition with a stepwise escalation of inhaled therapies, an approach that left the most severe cases cycling through treatments misaligned with their underlying biology. Updated global guidelines from the Global Initiative for Asthma (GINA) and ARIA-EAACI have shifted the field toward precision, biomarker-guided care. Central to this shift is the formal recognition of clinical remission as an achievable treatment goal, with real-world registry data now reporting on-treatment remission rates of 22%-34% across severe asthma populations on biologics. The united airway concept, linking allergic rhinitis, chronic rhinosinusitis, and asthma through shared T2 mechanisms, is reinforced by new evidence but remains fragmented in clinical practice. Meanwhile, environmental pressures including climate-driven allergen changes and air pollution are widening the gap between scientific capability and patient access, particularly in low- and middle-income settings. This article proposes the airway integration readiness (AIR) framework as a conceptual tool for evaluating how effectively care systems connect phenotype-guided therapy, cross-specialty airway co-management, and longitudinal remission tracking. It synthesizes the current evidence base, tracing how asthma and allergic airway disease are being redefined from episodic symptom management toward integrated, remission-oriented care, and identifies the translational challenges that remain.
