Mission and Values

Paul A. Dayton
Department Head and Chair | Joint Department of Biomedical Engineering
William R. Kenan Jr. Distinguished Professor

 A common first question from those just getting acquainted with our department is, “What is a Joint Department?” Our department is uniquely structured as a single department that has multiple institutional homes. As with a typical academic department, we have one Chair/Department Head, a unified academic faculty and a central student body for our respective undergraduate and graduate programs. However, our inter-institutional locations consist of the following: The College of Arts and Sciences at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the School of Medicine at UNC-Chapel Hill and the College of Engineering at North Carolina State University.

A big advantage of being a joint department is all our faculty, students and staff have access to all facilities and resources available at both universities. Additionally, our faculty are available as instructors or research mentors to all students enrolled in our undergraduate and graduate degree programs. Biomedical Engineering is a broad discipline, but our joint appointment provides comprehensive resources and a broad range of expertise in five areas of research: Biomedical Imaging, Biomedical Microdevices, Pharmacoengineering, Regenerative Medicine and Rehabilitation Engineering.

The mission of the Joint Department of Biomedical Engineering is to unite engineering and medicine to improve lives. Our department’s three core values are: innovate, collaborate and translate. With more than 50 primary teaching and research faculty members and approximately 600 undergraduate, master’s and doctoral students, the Joint Department is on track to realize its ambitious vision of becoming a leader in real-world results: faculty productivity, student accomplishment and entrepreneurial success.