2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This research paper describes a faculty-led collaborative autoethnography exploring insights from the integration of health equity concepts across six core courses in an undergraduate biomedical engineering (BME) curriculum. Mounting health disparities are an urgent concern, with some counties in the United States even facing lower life expectancies in 2014 than in 1980 (Collins, 2017; Dwyer-Lindgren et al., 2017; Wang et al., 2013). The Centers for Disease Control defines health disparities as “preventable differences in the burden of disease, injury, violence, or opportunities to achieve optimal health that are experienced by socially disadvantaged populations” (CDC, 2008). Factors including race, ethnic background, class, gender, and place are well established as contributing to differences in health outcomes in the United States (National Academies of Sciences et al., 2017). Social determinants of health and implicit bias have also been a documented component of the complex drivers of health inequity. However, only more recently, healthcare technologies have come under scrutiny for their role in perpetuating health inequities (Lanier et al., 2022). Amidst this landscape, BME education is amplifying its calls to action, with a clear goal to improve students’ preparedness for addressing health inequities (Lanier et al., 2022; Vazquez et al., 2017). In the compelling words of Lanier et. al (Lanier et al., 2022): “As biomedical engineers developing the next generation of healthcare technologies, we are poised to either improve the health disparity landscape or further widen the gap.”

Despite a shared recognition of the importance of integrating health equity principles into BME curriculum, STEM curriculum has traditionally lacked engagement with health equity concepts (Benabentos et al., 2014; Vazquez, 2018), such as health disparities (Vazquez et al., 2017). Additionally, few best practices are documented in the literature to support engineering faculty in integrating health equity concepts into their courses. We aim to contribute to this gap in literature through a collaborative autoethnography of six biomedical engineering faculty members exploring lessons learned while integrating health equity concepts into core undergraduate courses across the BME curriculum at an R1 institution in the southeastern United States. Combined, faculty participants represent curriculum reform across six core courses, that span the sophomore, junior, and senior years of study at the institution, creating a “spine” of health equity concepts across the BME curriculum. Our guiding research question is: how do BME faculty integrate health equity concepts into core undergraduate BME courses, and what best practices can be illuminated to support further equity-focused curricular reform?

To explore this research question we leverage collaborative autoethnography, a foundational methodology in engineering education research (Case & Light, 2011) and an approach to research inquiry that is growing in use across disciplines (Lapadat, 2017). Our data collection for this autoethnographic study includes collaborative reflective meetings and asynchronous individual written faculty reflections with guided prompts. Data analysis utilized qualitative coding methods, including thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2022) and inductive coding (Saldaña, 2012), to synthesize insights across instructors and illuminate best practices to support equity-focused curricular reform. To support our research quality, our process was facilitated by an engineering education researcher, with quality measures underpinned by Le Roux’s (Le Roux, 2017) five evaluation criteria for autoethnographic research: contribution, credibility, resonance, self-reflexivity, and subjectivity. This work does not use data from human subjects and therefore does not meet the definition of human subjects research.

Based on our analysis, we describe themes that emerge across faculty perspectives and course contexts. We offer practical examples of curricular changes that incorporated health equity into core BME curriculum, often facilitated through problem-based learning challenges. We highlight best practices that emerged from the data for reforming BME curriculum to incorporate health equity concepts. Ultimately, this work serves to support BME faculty who seek to integrate health equity concepts into core courses as we collectively seek to strengthen the preparedness of BME graduates to address health disparities through their work.