When Department of Biomedical Engineering Professor Maribel Vazquez attends the annual meeting of the Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) in San Antonio next month, she will be inducted as one of its 2022 Fellows.
“I am greatly looking forward to being on stage to receive this honor from the society alongside my esteemed BME colleagues from across the nation,” says Vazquez. “Being a BMES Fellow honors my research contributions to the biomedical engineering community, as well as my broader outreach activities in raising awareness of U.S. health disparities through BME education and training.”
As a collaborative and inclusive professional society for biomedical engineering students, faculty, researchers, and industry professionals, BMES promotes the advancement of health and wellness through engineering innovation.
For Vazquez, being named a BMES Fellow is an acknowledgement of her overall research efforts in developing microfluidics to study the nervous system. “It also highlights my most recent projects in retinal engineering,” she explains. “We are one of only a handful of labs that focus on adult retinal diseases in order to develop therapies that address disparities in vision loss across different American communities. This research has been dramatically enriched by the excellent resources and students at Rutgers, as well as by my RU BME colleagues who have enthusiastically promoted and championed my successes.”
A Recognition of Decades of Service
For Vazquez, who joined the BME faculty in 2019 and was inducted as a 2020 Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), becoming a BMES Fellow is a meaningful personal and professional milestone.
“This is an honor that recognizes 20 years of my professional service in broadening translational BME opportunities for micro/nanotechnologies, as well as my heartfelt efforts to broaden the participation of non-traditional students in biomedical engineering,” she says.
“It is especially cool that my induction into the Class of 2022 BMES Fellows showcases the growing inclusion and recognition of researchers from under-represented backgrounds in biomedical engineering.”