OAKLAND – The UC systemwide Biotechnology Research and Education Program has awarded 11 new Graduate Research and Education in Adaptive bioTechnology training grants.
These two-year training awards will be used to conduct biotechnology-related research that incorporates cross-disciplinary training in areas that span essentially all fields of science, engineering, medicine and agriculture and are from a diverse array of backgrounds.
At $50,000 per year, these grants are among the highest individual awards given for graduate education and training anywhere in the nation.
The total number of cross-disciplinary biotechnology training grants supported by the Biotechnology Research and Education Program (UCBREP) is now at a steady state of 22 per year. In 2004, the first 11 GREAT grants were awarded.
The 2006 Graduate Research and Education in Adaptive bioTechnology award recipients are:
UC Berkeley:
- Biophysics student Jesse Dill, who is performing single-molecule studies of protein folding dynamics under the direction of Prof. Susan Marqusee
- Biophysics student Elaine Trepagnier, who is designing a model system to study the translocation of single biopolymers through pores and cavities in biological molecular machines in the laboratory of Prof. Jan Liphardt
UC Davis:
- Mathematics student Roy Wollman, who is working on a system level analysis of the mitotic machinery under the sponsorship of Prof. Jonathan Scholey.
- Chemistry student Jennifer Cash, who is developing linear-dendritic polymers as scaffolds for nerve tissue engineering with Prof. Timothy Patten
- Biomedical engineering student Babak Sanii, who is using mechanical curvature to promote membrane fusion in Prof. Atul Parikh’s laboratory
UC Irvine:
- Biochemical engineering student Amy Hellman, who is researching the development of a laser microbeam/microscope platform for rapid single cell bioanalytics under the direction of Prof. Vasan Venugopalan
UCLA:
- Electrical engineering student Margaret Chiang, who is developing a light microscope for sub-diffraction nanoscale bio-imaging under sponsorship of Prof. Jia-Ming Liu
- Biomedical engineering student Ryan Schmidt, whose research is in the area of locus-specific chip-ms, an innovative new technology for studying epigenetic gene regulation during stem cell differentiation with Prof. Yi Eve Sun
UC San Diego:
- Bioinformatics student Alice Kiselyuk, who is conducting high-throughput screening for compounds that regulate beta-cell proliferation under sponsorship of Prof. Fred Levine
- Biomedical engineering student Karen Wei, who is designing a 3-D tissue culture platform in Prof. Andrew McCulloch’s laboratory
- Bioengineering student Megan Blewis, who is bioengineering joints as a platform for biotechnology and biomaterial therapies under direction of Prof. Robert Sah
The Graduate Research and Education in Adaptive bioTechnology program supports the training of the brightest graduate students in theoretical and experimental research at the interface between the life sciences and the physical, chemical, engineering, mathematical and computational sciences. All but one UC campus (UC Merced being the exception; the campus just opened last year) has received at least one of these prestigious systemwide grants.
The training program was developed three years ago by the UC Biotechnology Research and Education Program. In addition to creating and nurturing GREAT, the mission of the program includes informing those in government, industry, and the public about developments in biotechnology and the impact of those developments in the public arena.
The GREAT program graduates its first trainees this year. Notable accomplishments include those of Adam Seipel of UC Santa Cruz, who secured an appointment as a tenure-track assistant professor at Cornell University immediately out of graduate school. His seminal work, which appeared in the journal Nature (November 2004), applied new computational methods for the detection of functional elements in the human genome, reducing protein-coding genes from an initially estimated 35,000 to only 20,000 to 25,000.
Seipel said he had great difficulty obtaining support as a returning graduate student, and that the GREAT program made it possible for him to undertake a novel project and complete graduate school in record time.
Current trainee Fulai Lin of UCLA made the cover of Nature Methods (March 2006) with his work on a revolutionary interactome mapping system for protein complexes, which will allow meaningful interrogation of large-scale data sets, a fundamental requirement of systems biology. This work was performed in conjunction with the Carlsbad, CA, firm Invitrogen Corp.
According to Prof. Martina Newell McGloughlin, director of the Biotechnology Research and Education Program, “Rapid advancements in technology are catalyzed by providing an environment to nurture diverse fields of study. Examples are found in the areas of nanotechnology and modeling of biological materials.
“In a spirited competition that encompassed top candidates from all of the UC campuses, the leading 11 were chosen based on their demonstrated ability to understand and solve problems that cross over diverse disciplines.
“The UC system as an institution of higher education must facilitate and support the creation of novel training programs for graduate students in diverse fields of study to encourage the next generation of innovations. This is what the GREAT training grants are all about.”
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