A Multidisciplined Teaching Reform of Biomaterials Course for Undergraduate Students

The biomaterials science has advanced in a high speed with global science and technology development during the recent decades, which experts predict to be more obvious in the near future with a more significant position for medicine and health care. Although the three traditional subjects, such as medical science, materials science and biology that act as a scaffold to support the structure of biomaterials science, are still essential for the research and education of biomaterials, other subjects, such as mechanical engineering, mechanics, computer science, automatic science, nanotechnology, and Bio-MEMS, are playing more and more important roles in the modern biomaterials science development. Thus, the research and education of modern biomaterials science should require a logical integration of the interdisciplinary science and technology, which not only concerns medical science, materials science and biology, but also includes other subjects that have been stated above. This article focuses on multidisciplinary nature of biomaterials, the awareness of which is currently lacking in the education at undergraduate stage. In order to meet this educational challenge, we presented a multidisciplinary course that referred to not only traditional sciences, but also frontier sciences and lasted for a whole academic year for senior biomaterials undergraduate students with principles of a better understanding of the modern biomaterials science and meeting the requirements of the future development in this area. The course has been shown to gain the recognition of the participants by questionaries and specific “before and after” comments and has also gained high recognition and persistent supports from our university. The idea of this course might be also fit for the education and construction of some other disciplines.