Celebrating 10 Years of BBE

Richard Murray. Credit: Caltech

This year marks a decade since the Division of Biology voted to incorporate the growing discipline of bioengineering and to change its name to the Division of Biology and Biological Engineering (BBE).

The transformation combined the division’s traditional academic concentrations—genetics, biochemistry, developmental biology, immunobiology, microbiology, molecular biology, and neurobiology—with its newly established strengths in the fields of bioengineering, genomics, synthetic biology, and computational biology.

As a result of this reorganization, the number of faculty members in the division grew considerably, with 10 joint appointments awarded to researchers in other divisions whose work had a bioengineering focus. “Modern research in biology is increasingly intertwined with technological advances,” says Richard Murray (BS ’85), the William K. Bowes Jr. Leadership Chair of BBE. “Those technological advances in turn allow the possibility of providing new solutions to societal problems, ranging from human health, to sustainability, to new materials and devices.”