Job opportunities for biomedical engineers?

[Elante]

Hello all!

I recently graduated with a BS in physics and I will be entering a PhD program for biomedical engineering this upcoming Fall. I have several questions about the professional careers of biomedical engineers, though:

1) Where are BME PhDs typically employed? I would guess they're usually employed by universities?

2) Which subfields of biomedical engineering is in high-demand? (As far as I know, these are biomaterials, imaging, biomechanics, and neural engineering)

3) How much $$ can you expect to make in a year?

4) Which regions (if any in particular) in the US have a high demand for biomedical engineers?

I'm most interested in neural engineering and computational neuroscience, but I guess I'm worried that those subfields aren't as much in demand as some of the other ones (prosthetics and what not). Basically, I want to be very employable whether it be in academia, industry, government, etc., and I'm willing to do something a little less interesting to me in exchange for a high chance of getting a job when I finish my degree.

Any answers/comments would be appreciated! :)

 

[Ben Espen]

A good place to look for information on (1) (3) and (4) is the Bureau of Labor Statistics website.

Here is the page on biomedical engineers:
http://www.bls.gov/oes/2009/may/oes172031.htm

This provides you with wage distributions, locations, and industries. One thing this data does not provide is a breakdown by education level. You will have to look elsewhere for that information. However, from this page, you can see that the majority of biomedical engineers work in industry. If you follow the links to get the complete table, only 920 out of 46330 biomedical engineers work in a university. Those who do are likely to be mostly PhDs, but I suspect that most PhDs in this field work in the medical device and pharmaceutical fields.

As for part (2), I suggest looking into the professional societies that serve BioEs and seeing what is currently hot. This document http://www.careercornerstone.org/pdf/bioeng/bioeng.pdf contains links to a variety of professional societies.

 

[Elante]

Thanks for the info Ben!

If you don't mind me asking, are you a biomedical engineer?

 

[Ben Espen]

You are welcome. I am not a biomedical engineer, but rather a medical engineer. I simply work in the medical device field, designing implantable medical devices. My education is in physics, but I do work with a number of people who have BioE degrees from Bachelors to PhD.