Grad finds his calling in biomedical engineering

When Brendan Morgan first enrolled in UVic’s electrical engineering program, he had no idea it included a biomedical engineering option. But after co-op and research positions involving cardiac performance and remote transmission of ECG data from ambulance to emergency room, this year’s winner of the IEEE Victoria Section Gold Medal in Electrical Engineering is heading for a medical, rather than engineering, future.

“When I found out about the biomedical option, I jumped on it, and the more time I spent with medical technology, the more I became interested in patient interaction and medical science as opposed to engineering aspects of biomedicine,” he says. “My co-op positions helped me identify that.”

A Halifax native who moved to Victoria as a toddler and attended Oak Bay High School, Morgan chose UVic because of its co-op program. “I was accepted into several other universities, but UVic’s co-op program is one of the best in the country. It provides contacts and opportunities for networking that really help you get into your field.”

His work assisting the Vancouver Island Health Authority to install and activate software so paramedics can remotely transmit patient ECG info to an ER was followed by a research project with UVic’s Dr. Alexandra Branzan Albu involving the development of software that calculates the pumping capacity of the heart’s “neglected” left atrium chamber.

He followed that up with a co-op term in Ottawa with Health Canada and the Department of National Defense developing a prototype detector that harnesses cosmic rays from the atmosphere to detect special nuclear materials such as uranium and plutonium in shipping containers.

The nine-to-five job left him with a “lot of free time; something that was really foreign to me,” so he volunteered at the surgical day unit at the University of Ottawa Heart Institute. After returning to Victoria, he also volunteered in the emergency department of Royal Jubilee Hospital.

The son of a cardiologist, Morgan said he initially resisted following in his father’s footsteps, but now he’s signed up for fall organic chemistry and biochemistry classes at UVic and hopes to apply to medical school next year.

But first he’s taking a long-delayed vacation. “Because of co-op I’m usually in class in the summertime. I haven’t taken a summer vacation since high school.” So before he hits the books again, Morgan and a friend are taking a road trip down the California coast, and he’ll satisfy his inner nerd at the ComicCon convention in San Diego.

The conference centre is three blocks long and three stories high and it’s going to be packed,” laughs Morgan. “It’s going to be amazing.”