IGERT: Training Innovative Leaders in Biofabrication

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This Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) award establishes a unique training program at WPI for Ph.D. students in the field of bioengineering, and specifically biofabrication. The program will train students in the entrepreneurial mindset, providing graduates with skills necessary to contribute to the innovation economy while also addressing important medical needs.Intellectual Merit: The goal of this training program is to produce engineers who will be future innovators in academia and industry, leading to the translation and commercialization of bioengineering and biofabrication technologies. Today?s medical devices suffer from the drawback that their materials are foreign to the human body and prone to rejection. The growing field of biofabrication uses biological matter as the basic building blocks to assemble advanced biological tissues for treatments and screenings. Trainees will participate in mentored lab research, formal coursework in their discipline, and international research collaborations. In addition, trainees will develop an entrepreneurial mindset through integrated entrepreneurship training modules, and an immersive innovation culture at WPI?s Life Science and Bioengineering Center, a mixed-use research/industrial facility. Finally, hands-on industry training will expose the IGERT trainees to the needs and use of consumers.Broader Impacts: This program will help sustain America?s innovation economy by training Ph.D. students to be future leaders in biofabrication. True to WPI?s educational and training philosophy, ?Lehr und Kunst? (Theory and Practice), the proposed research aims are focused on practical approaches to developing commercially viable enabling technologies to fulfill critical unmet needs in biofabrication. International research experiences will be provided in collaboration with Politecnico di Milano in Italy and Tsinghua University in China. Outcomes of the IGERT experience are also anticipated to extend beyond the program and may be measured as new companies launched, jobs created, patents filed, and products reaching clinical trials.IGERT is an NSF-wide program intended to meet the challenges of educating U.S. Ph.D. scientists and engineers with the interdisciplinary background, deep knowledge in a chosen discipline, and the technical, professional, and personal skills needed for the career demands of the future. The program is intended to establish new models for graduate education and training in a fertile environment for collaborative research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries, and to engage students in understanding the processes by which research is translated to innovations for societal benefit.