The Cornell Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS) Program in Biomechanical Engineering

Cornell’s most successful collaboration between its College of Engineering and its Medical Center 250 miles away in New York City is through the Cornell-Hospital for Special Surgery Program in Biomechanical Engineering. The Program has served as a model for linkage programs between the Ithaca and New York City campuses, fostering educational and research programs between engineering faculty and students at Cornell and clinical and research staff at HSS.   The Program has also been instrumental in the development of the Biomedical Engineering Department at Cornell, which has broadened the linkage beyond biomechanics to include other biomedical programs such as nanobiotechnology, imaging, instrumentation, and tissue engineering. The Hospital for Special Surgery is the orthopaedic component of Weill Cornell Medical College. Most scientists and physicians at the Hospital hold Weill Cornell faculty

appointments  and with the creation of the graduate field of Biomedical Engineering in 1997, several hold Cornell Ithaca graduate faculty appointments as well. The Hospital is a private, not-for-profit institution. For many years it has been ranked first or second among hospitals in orthopaedics by US News and World Report. 

The Cornell-HSS Program was created in 1978 by the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the Ithaca campus in collaboration with the Department of Biomechanics and Biomaterials at HSS. The rationale for the creation of the Program was to formalize strong ties between the two institutions to promote collaborative research, teaching patient care projects.
  

Over the years, the Program has fostered collaborations between HSS research scientists and clinicians and Cornell faculty and students in disciplines including mechanical engineering, materials science, civil engineering, polymers, chemical engineering, veterinary medicine, and statistics.  As a part of the program staff from HSS travel to Ithaca to teach students at both the undergraduate and graduate level and faculty from Cornell travel to New York to teach medical students and residents. Faculty from the HSS Department of Biomechanics and Biomaterials frequently serve as thesis committee members and advisors for students seeking MS and PhD degrees in biomechanical engineering at the Ithaca campus. The Program also facilitates  access

to equipment and resources to researchers at both locations, including the Musculoskeletal Repair and Regeneration Core Center, College of Veterinary Medicine, Cornell Nanobiotechnology Center and the Cornell Center for Materials Research.                                

In 1998 with support from a Whitaker Foundation Special Opportunity award the Program developed an immersion experience to allow graduate students to spend extended periods in New York City for research and for medical students or residents to spend time in Ithaca. The immersion experience for Ithaca based graduate students has become a part of the field of biomedical engineering’s graduate curriculum The award also helped to strength ties between the two locations through the purchase of dedicated video conferencing equipment for both locations. Video conferencing has become an integral part of ongoing collaborations, researchers are able to interact in weekly meetings, journal clubs and research presentations without the need to travel.

The Program is directed by Professor Marjolein van der Meulen in close collaboration with Timothy M. Wright, PhD, the Director of the HSS Department of Biomechanics and Biomaterials.  This program has the strong support of the Dean of the College of Engineering , the Director of Research at HSS, the Surgeon-in-Chief at HSS, and the CEO of the Hospital.