The universe of activity that is bioengineering research

What is bioengineering? A concise and meaningful answer to this question is important for pedagogy. This paper demonstrates that research activity within ´bioengineering´ resides in a multidimensional space. A specific study can be characterized by an area into which it falls, a problem that it attacks, a specific level of analysis, a species of focus, pertinent disciplines, relevant tools that are employed, and temporal features. Each represents a dimension of the universe and each dimension may be shown to be largely orthogonal to every other dimension. The universe thus defined is sparsely populated. Accordingly, bioengineering is a field of rich opportunity within which frontiers lie almost everywhere.