Your health has a new friend. Kettering University in Flint, Michigan, has joined other leading universities that are working on multi-disciplinary approaches to pre-medical education and technology-enhanced solutions to medical challenges. The heightened relationship between tech-savvy medical doctors, engineers and scientists with fundamental knowledge in both the life and physical sciences is growing rapidly, and it may prove to be just what the patient ordered. For example, medicine has an increasingly effective R & D ally in engineers. Engineers with training in the life sciences are able to envision new technological solutions to challenges in medical research. It’s a united effort that is both cross-functional and value-added for today’s patients.

This development cracks open new career paths for today’s high school and college students. Prospective “pre-med” majors may find that blending life science knowledge with that in the physical sciences and engineering is exactly the silver bullet they are looking for to get into their preferred medical school. At least that’s what Kettering alumni are saying. Our graduates are telling us that high profile medical schools like Michigan, Emory, Northwestern and Georgia Tech are intrigued by the capabilities of students emerging from pre-med programs that integrate physical science and life science education and training.

  That’s particularly the case for Sam Perlmutter, formerly of Detroit. Sam spent his undergraduate years at Kettering in an engineering co-op job at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago/Northwestern University Physical Therapy and Human Movement Science program. His skills in constructing one-of-a-kind technological tools to enable research on repetitive motion injuries landed him a fellowship in Northwestern’s Ph.D. program in neuroscience, and he conducts his doctoral research in the Feinberg School of Medicine.

Kettering’s new premedical course of study also retains and builds on a long-standing Kettering tradition, co-operative education. Co-operative education is mandatory in all of Kettering’s programs of study. Each year about 2,000 undergraduates are employed in co-op positions in more than 600 corporate settings around the world. Our philosophy is to engage students in two separate but integrated learning environments. Students alternate academic and co-op terms throughout their undergraduate program of study. It’s an educational philosophy that has benefited many industries, from automotive manufacturing to the production of medical devices, such as heart stints and joint replacements. Kettering’s new pre-med course of study will continue this tradition and will provide our students with a special foundation for medical school and the growing number of wonderful opportunities in tomorrow’s fields of medicine.

If you’d like to read more about this topic, please visit the Kettering Web site at www.kettering.edu.