Southern California: A hotbed of biomedical engineering: Nine bioengineers describe their research and why Southern California has the Biotech market cornered

This August, the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society will hold its 34th Annual International Conference in San Diego, California, with the theme egineering innovation in global health. Just north of the city is La Jollahome to one of the nation's top-ranked bioengineering programs. And if you don't mind the traffic, you can venture to Los Angeles, where the west coast's very first bioengineering program began in 1974. Biotech is California's second largest employer in the high-tech industry, next only to information technology. The explosion of biomedical engineering (BME) activity in the last four decades makes this locale an appropriate setting for a meeting of one of the biomedical oldest engineering societies of the United States. As a sampling of what to expect at the conference, researchers from the region describe what is getting them excited about their work these days, the future of BME research, and why biotech settled by the beach.