Vanderbilt’s School of Engineering announced its partnership with the Vanderbilt Institute for Surgery and Engineering and the School of Medicine to launch an integrated MD/Master of Engineering pathway in Surgery and Intervention. The program adds a one-year Master of Engineering experience to the standard MD curriculum for students seeking engineering training as part of their medical degree.
Students start by identifying clinical needs, then they move through concept development, prototyping and testing. The curriculum, built for medical students, emphasizes medical AI and machine learning alongside hands-on medical device development. With mentorship from engineering and VUMC faculty, students complete a capstone in a Vanderbilt lab where they design, build and test a solution intended to translate into real clinical use.
In an interview with The Hustler, program co-director Jon Heiselman explained how the traditional MD route is designed to train clinicians but often does not include instruction about the technical depth needed to build new tools.
“So much of [medical] training is very focused on the clinical practice itself, and [medical students] might have some exposure to doing, say, chart review,” Heiselman said. “But when it comes to really substantively shifting the needle for what’s possible, very often we need to be developing new tools.”
Michael Miga, program director and chair of the Department of Biomedical Engineering, said the pathway arrives at a moment when data and machine learning are increasingly shaping how clinical decisions are made. He described a future where clinical judgment is informed not only by what a physician has seen in a single room but also by patterns drawn from far more cases than any one clinician could realistically encounter.
“Just imagine if you can bring in 100,000 clinical conferences and build consensus with so many different measurements that can be captured and recognized across the data that’s available. That’s pretty powerful,” Miga said.
Miga expressed that — for Vanderbilt students drawn to both medicine and engineering — the pathway signals that technical fluency is becoming more central to clinical work, not just an optional interest on the side. It represents a formal route for students who wish to practice medicine while also helping shape the tools and systems that increasingly define how care is administered.
“If you spent your whole four years developing engineering skill sets, why not use them?” Miga said. “What we’ve noticed in some areas is that engineers are great problem solvers [since] they look at the problem differently than [students of] other disciplines.”
Student reactions
Senior Victor Dunagan, a double major in biomedical engineering and electrical and computer engineering, shared in an interview with The Hustler that he thinks this program will be extremely beneficial for him and his classmates who are interested in the intersection of healthcare and engineering.
“As someone who is kind of stuck in the middle of trying to figure out how to use an engineering background for clinical experience and combine that insight for surgical innovation or medical device innovation, I think this is a really big step forward,” Dunagan said. “I think it will really help a lot of people out who are trying to do engineering and pre-med and who feel like they are chasing a career that does not exist.”
Dunagan also appreciated how the new master’s program offers more flexibility for students interested in working their schedule around potential internships and immersion experiences. He shared that the existing undergraduate biomedical engineering program could also benefit from a similar specialized experience.
“I feel like the biomedical engineering program has a lot of prerequisites, and I think maybe they should reduce some of those prerequisites and make it to where students have the ability to take a semester to be able to do co-op or something similar,” Dunagan said.
Sophomore Isiah Menard shared a similar sentiment, believing the program will enable current students to combine their classroom knowledge with hands-on experience while allowing them to be in close proximity with professional clinicians and engineers.
“It seems like a really good program,” Menard said. “It’s exciting because if somebody had wanted to do an engineering PhD while doing [an] MD, there was a bunch of overlap that made it incredibly difficult.”
Senior Nathan Hammond, a biomedical engineering and pre-med student, expressed that the announcement has influenced his decision to apply to Vanderbilt’s medical school.
“In looking at medical schools for my future endeavors, I always would prefer schools that have a master’s plus medical program, especially a master’s in surgical engineering because it is what I am interested in,” Hammond said. “Once I saw that Vandy was doing one, it definitely made my ear perk up [a] little bit more toward Vanderbilt in terms of [applying to their] medical school.”
