Promoting Teaching-Focused Faculty in Biomedical Engineering: Education Summit Highlights Best Practices for Professional Development

Promoting teaching-focused faculty to higher ranks presents a unique set of challenges that arise from the traditional focus on research within academia and the evolving demands of academia. Understanding these challenges is essential to developing policies and practices that ensure the advancement of teaching-focused faculty while maintaining the high standards required in biomedical engineering. This paper brings together literature findings and insights gained from the biomedical engineering faculty community to prepare a set of recommendations for the community to foster professional development and set clear pathways to promote faculty who serve in these roles. The paper combines literature findings with findings from the BME community taken from a session entitled, “Promoting instructional and tenure track faculty success, professional training, and individual mentorship,” which was part of the 2024 BME Education Summit hosted by the Council of Chairs. Topics that emerged from the discussion included challenges due to vague promotional criteria, evolving educational needs and invisible labor, lack of professional development, and lack of standardized promotion processes and pathways. These themes are supported in literature for fields outside of biomedical engineering. Discussion from the community underscores that teaching-focused faculty play a crucial role in biomedical engineering departments at research-intensive universities by enhancing the educational mission while promoting a positive culture around learning and student development. Our paper makes several recommendations for the BME/BioE Council of Chairs and ASEE Engineering Deans Institute for future work in this area that will be essential to grow the BME teaching faculty community and promote this specialized group of faculty to advance our field. The involvement and advocacy of campus leadership is critical in order to bring attention to these topics and change current policies.