Undergraduate biomedical engineering programs and curricula are being rapidly developed across the United States. We perceive a correspondingly increasing need for biomedical engineering textbooks specifically designed for undergraduate readers. Many educators have come to appreciate that physiology and biology are not narrow, specialized applications to be ‘‘tacked onto’’ an engineering curriculum, but are instead rich subjects that can naturally elicit and benefit from the kinds of creative problem-solving and quantitative analyses that are hallmarks of engineering. However, integrating life sciences within the structured and rigorous framework of fundamental knowledge required for an undergraduate engineering degree—especially early in the undergraduate curriculum, before the senior year or a ‘‘capstone’’ course—is still a.
