University of Cape Town

Brief description

Biomedical engineering history at the University of Cape Town (UCT) and Groote Schuur Hospital goes back to the 1950s, with work in nuclear medicine by Alan Cormack that led to computer-assisted tomography and the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1979.1 In 1969 the Department of Medical Physics and Bioengineering was formed. Soon after the establishment, 4 years later, of the Department of Biomedical Engineering as a separate entity, postgraduate programmes in biomedical engineering were introduced. When in 1982 the School of Biomedical Sciences was established in the Faculty of Medicine, Biomedical Engineering was one of its central departments. The endowed Hyman Goldberg Chair of Biomedical Engineering was filled in 1983. In 2000 Biomedicacl Engineering merged with Anatomy (including Cell Biology), and Physiology (including Sports Science) to form the Department of Human Biology. Alan Cormack’s legacy was honoured in 2000 with the establishment of the MRC/UCT Medical Imaging Research Unit within the Department of Human Biology.

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