Medical Physics and Biomedical
Engineering is the application of
Physics and Engineering principles to
solve clinical problems.
Without physicists and engineers,
there wouldn't be the advancements in technologies
and treatments that we see today.
The technology that medical physics and
biomedical engineers enable include
advanced radio therapies such as 
proton beam radiotherapy;
advanced imaging, such
as with MRI scanners;
or rehabilitation and medicine, 
such as the design of wheelchairs.
When I was in the sixth form studying as
an a-level student I had an interest in
Medicine and everyone told me I was
going to be a doctor — and it was the talk
that I heard about Medical Physics at
the London International Science Forum
that made me realise there was another
way of using my interest in Medicine, and
switched me from the career path of
Medicine to Medical Physics
and that's a decision I've never regretted.
So, here at UCL, we believe that 
research-based education
is a very good way of
giving students the technical knowledge
but also the context while learning and
that is something that we embrace in the
Biomedical Engineering programme, 
and it's actually quite easy because
our Department is brilliant in terms of research.
I think it's very important
that our students are taught by people
working in the state-of-the-art, so our
lecturers are world leading and
nationally leading scientists in their
own right, telling them about what's
going on in the discipline right now.
I think we give students a variety of skills
across the board, from theory to
equations manipulations, all the way to
the design and constructions of systems
and machines that work – it's a varied mix
of skill: we're strongly interdisciplinary,
we're at the interface of Physics, Maths,
Medicine and Engineering,
and typically then you can look at jobs in research, academia or other research institutions,
you can look at jobs in
industry or health services, for example the NHS.
So during the first week, the
students will be doing an in-class
activity which is called "pebble in the
pond". The aim of the activity is to
deliver a pebble from one end of a table
to the other. The learning objectives of
it are much greater; and it gives the
students the experience of working in
teams for first time, that we can discuss
later on in the class.
This department just allows you to meet so many
different people from different
backgrounds and it's kind of like a
little family in a very strange way and
then in terms of the actual work itself
you generally get a lot of support to
try lots of different things. As a
physicist, I've now delved into radiation biology.
The other thing I really appreciate 
is the fact that you can
start cross-disciplinary collaborations
with other departments, so for example
for my project, I've been working with a
group based at the Institute of Neurology.
What I love most about working in
this Department is that you're faced
with new challenges all the time in
terms of Physics and Biomedical
Engineering. You never quite know where
the next project is going to come from
and quite how that's going to involve
you in different collaborations that you
may not have thought of before.
What I like best is that we are 
still a reasonably small Department,
we know everybody: we know each 
other very very well,
and we like our students, we have the
time, we have an open-door office and we
take the time to speak to them.
We tend to attract students 
who are interested not just
in science as discipline, but in how
it can be used to benefit society and
particularly how it can help development 
of new techniques in healthcare.
Our students are people who enjoy
working in a multidisciplinary
environment, working closely with
clinicians
and patients to produce engineering or
physical solutions
to real clinical problems.
