Roderic I. Pettigrew, PhD, MD, a physician-scientist and internationally recognized leader in biomedical imaging and bioengineering, will join Texas A&M to lead Engineering Health (EnHealth), the nation’s first comprehensive educational program to fully integrate engineering into all health-related disciplines.
EnHealth will be an innovative, multi-college engineering health initiative in Houston to educate a new kind of health care professional with an engineering mindset who will invent transformational technology for health care’s greatest challenges. With Texas A&M’s interdisciplinary makeup and colleges of dentistry, medicine, nursing, pharmacy, public health and veterinary medicine, EnHealth will have a profound impact on both human and animal health. EnMed, the university’s engineering medicine track in partnership with Houston Methodist Hospital, will serve as the first program for EnHealth.
“The way to solve the world’s most challenging health care problems and perhaps prevent many of them in the first place,” said Michael K. Young, president of Texas A&M University, “is to take a more integrated approach to education and treatment. With this announcement, Texas A&M is harnessing the best across two historically different disciplines – engineering and medicine – to accelerate quality and delivery of care. It’s a new day for integrated health care, and we’re so proud to have Dr. Pettigrew at the helm of this endeavor.”
At Texas A&M, Pettigrew will lead the continued development of EnMed, a partnership announced last summer between the state’s top-ranked Houston Methodist Hospital, the College of Engineering and the College of Medicine to educate a new type of doctor – a physician engineer – or “physicianeer.” EnMed, which will welcome its inaugural class in fall 2019, is expected to be the largest engineering-based medical degree program in the nation.
“With the creation of our EnMed program and its unique focus on inventing and rapidly moving new medical technologies into practice, we realized the potential to impact all areas of health and the idea of EnHealth was born,” said M. Katherine Banks, vice chancellor and dean of Texas A&M Engineering. “Dr. Pettigrew is the ideal leader for this initiative and has the transformational vision to develop this new type of health care ecosystem.”