| 2:20 p.m., Jan. 17, 2003--The National Science Foundation (NSF) has announced a five-year, $2.9 million grant to support graduate education in biotechnology at the University of Delaware.
The money is provided to the University through NSF’s Integrative Graduate Education Research Traineeship (IGERT) program.
IGERT is designed “to transform graduate education from the traditional approach of educating students within one discipline to a multidisciplinary approach that prepares students better for the real world, where careers now require the ability to work productively with people having different academic backgrounds,” according to Mary J. Wirth, C. Eugene Bennett Professor in the UD Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, and principal investigator for the grant.
“The focus of the University of Delaware’s IGERT grant is biotechnology, which is a rapidly evolving field that includes an especially diverse range of academic disciplines,” Wirth said.
The University’s grant has 24 participating faculty from four colleges and nine departments: biological sciences, chemistry and biochemistry, computer and information sciences, English and psychology, all in the College of Arts and Science; business administration in the Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics; chemical engineering and materials science and engineering in the College of Engineering; and plant and soil sciences in the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources.
The Delaware Biotechnology Institute is also involved in the grant.
Over the five-year duration of the grant, the University projects 45 participating graduate students.
Industrial participants span dozens of companies, and they will present lectures, host graduate students as interns and serve as mentors for graduate students, Wirth said.
“The value of this program to UD is that it will attract more of the top graduate students in the nation and it will stimulate significant advances in research through collaborations across disciplines,” Wirth said. “The NSF IGERT grant allows the University to provide graduate stipends and tuition support to students selected through a competitive application process.”
Wirth said biotechnology is an economically vital field that will benefit from strong interactions between academia and industry.
“Our IGERT grant is a joint effort among UD, the Delaware Biotechnology Institute and the local biotechnology industries, particularly DuPont, AstraZeneca, Agilent and the Fraunhofer Center for Molecular Biotechnology,” she said. “UD has unique research strengths and modern, newly constructed facilities in all of the diverse fields that comprise biotechnology. Industry can no longer afford to perform the research needed to make the new discoveries that will help them prosper, and today’s students are eager to investigate exciting research problems that promise to have significant impact on our economy, our health and our environment.”
Wirth added that “great universities and prosperous businesses have emerged together by synergistic interactions.”
Co-principal investigators for the UD grant are Cynthia Farach-Carson, professor of biological sciences; Abraham Lenhoff, Gore Professor of Chemical Engineering; John Rabolt, Böer Professor and chair of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering; John Sawyer, chair of the Department of Business Administration; and Janine Sherrier, assistant professor of plant and soil science.
The IGERT program was initiated in 1997 and now comprises approximately 100 award sites.
Overall, 18 IGERT awards for 2003 have been announced to date. All are for five years, and range between $2.7 million and $2.9 million. Program officials expect that four more awards will be made soon to complete the year’s total.
In addition to UD, recipients for 2002 announced to date are Boston, Colorado State, Columbia, Drexel, Duke and Ohio State universities, City University of New York, Georgia Tech, Texas Tech and the universities of California at San Diego, California at Santa Barbara, Florida, Maine, Michigan, South Florida and Utah. UC-Santa Barbara received two awards.
According to the NSF, the program has been developed to meet the challenges of educating scientists, engineers and educators with the interdisciplinary backgrounds, deep knowledge in chosen disciplines and technical, professional and personal skills to become in their own careers the leaders and creative agents for change.
The program is intended to catalyze a cultural change in graduate education, for students, faculty and institutions by establishing innovative new models for graduate education and training in a fertile environment for collaborative research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries. It is also intended to facilitate greater diversity in student participation and preparation and to contribute to the development of a diverse and globally engaged science and engineering work force.
Article by Neil Thomas
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