Guide to Graduate Study in Area VII:
Welcome to Area VII
This guide is primarily written for entering graduate students who have come from undergraduate universities other than MIT, and who intend eventually to obtain a PhD at MIT. It is intended as a planning guide for the first two years, which is the normal period for obtaining the masters degree and completing the departmental Technical Qualifying Exam (TQE).
For administrative convenience, the faculty and graduate students in the department are divided up into six primary research "areas" according to their preferences. And although the area definitions are somewhat arbitrary—and the boundaries between them often quite artificial—many of these areas have a long history and well-established culture. Area VII is certainly no exception, and as a result, its boundaries are deliberately fuzzy and there is considerable overlap and many connections with other areas.
Research in the bioelectrical engineering area can be roughly categorized as follows:
Living Systems
Primary focus is on understanding living systems. Examples include: auditory physiology and perception, human speech communication, the transmission and coding of signals in the nervous system, behavior of organisms, electrochemical properties of biological membranes, muscle physiology, interaction of high energy particles with living matter.
Engineering with a Living Systems Component
Primary focus is on engineering problems which contain a living systems component or whose specification requires some knowledge of properties of living systems. Examples include: biomedical electronics, biological image processing, sensory-aid systems for the deaf and blind, clinical uses of high-energy particle beams and high energy X-rays in the treatment of tumors, reading machines for the blind, automatic speech recognition, human-machine interfaces for teleoperator and virtual-environment systems.
The Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science is one of a number of departments at MIT with research and teaching activities in bioengineering. A program has also been established in Medical Engineering/Medical Physics (MEMP) within the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology; students who are admitted both to the department and to the program may obtain a Master of Science in EECS and a PhD in Medical Engineering/Medical Physics.
Louis Braida, Area VII chair
Fall, 2009