Doctors with Chemical Engineering Backgrounds

[bluestardiver]

Hi! I'm a chemical engineer looking into going to med school next school year. While medicine is my first love and I would love love love to do research, I was just curious if I'd still be able to use my chemical engineering background in doing research in the field of medicine? That is my ultimate, ideal (and ambitious?) plan. I'm just curious if it's at all possible to merge the two as a working doctor-engineer.

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[lunt]

In general, medicine definitely needs engineers-doctors. These are the only people who understand both parts (technical and medical) of the development of a new instrument.
Communication is actually a problem for research these days. Doctors can formulate their needs in ways engineers can understand.

 

[ChE04]

There are a couple schools that will help you incorporate the two. HTE@USC is one program I can think of right off the bat. Outside of these dedicated programs, I know that there are plenty of other ChE profs at other institutions that collaborate on research with MDs, and I suppose it would just be a matter of approaching one of them.

Flat out merging the two fields I think might be unrealistic. Medicine will pretty much consume your life while in training, at least, and while you might be able to utilize your engineering background to some extent in research, your primary focus will still be on medicine.