History

A Biomedical Engineering Program of Distinction was established in the early 1970s at the University of Florida under the auspices of the State of Florida Legislature and Board of Regents. The Program evolved and expanded and was later designated a Center of Excellence within the Materials Science and Engineering Department with a specific focus on Biomaterials. Following Larry Hench, the founding director, Eugene Goldberg, became Director of the  Center of Excellence in 1978. He placed stronger emphasis on polymeric biomaterials research and education. This has now been designated the Biomaterials Center, and provides leadership for a broad range of collaborative studies involving the Colleges of Engineering, Medicine and Liberal Arts and Sciences with extensive interactions with industry and with other institutions.

With health care expenditures now exceeding one and a half trillion dollars per year and with a U.S. medical device and  implant industry at about sixty billion dollars per year, biomaterials advances for medical instruments, devices, prosthetic implants, diagnostics, and pharmaceuticals are essential to some of the most rapidly growing, most important, and most exciting elements of health care.