Nanoscience Connected to Life: An Interdisciplinary Traineeship Program in Bioinspired Nanotechnology

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The living world provides many fascinating examples of highly evolved, sophisticated machinery working in synergy to sustain life. A fundamental understanding of nature’s architectures and processes can be applied to create new biology-inspired and green technologies for the benefit of human and environmental health. However, this challenging task requires integrating aspects of research in biology, chemistry, and physics focused down to the smallest functional scale: the nanoscale. This NSF Research Traineeship (NRT), "Nanoscience Connected to Life: an Interdisciplinary Traineeship Program in Bioinspired Nanotechnology," will provide education, research, and career development to help build a new workforce in the emerging field of bioinspired nanotechnology. As this field undergoes rapid expansion and industry embraces these new approaches, society needs a uniquely trained and diverse workforce. Building on the City University of New York’s (CUNY) reputation as an engine for upward mobility of a diverse student population, this traineeship will provide a novel and comprehensive graduate education for 125 graduate students. The program will serve 25 directly funded trainees, including individuals from minority populations underrepresented in their pursuit of STEM fields of study, women, and members of the LGBTQ+ community. Graduates will become effective leaders who will be able to solve complex problems facing the U.S. and provide new scientific breakthroughs in energy harvesting, agriculture, medicine, and environmental remediation. The broad educational vision of this project is to train a generation of STEM Ph.D. students as collaborative, systems-level thinkers who can translate concepts across scales and disciplines. The project strengthens and integrates chemistry, biochemistry, and physics Ph.D. programs at CUNY through convergence around common goals. Students will become well-positioned to work on convergent teams to address urgent societal challenges related to environmental instabilities and health crises. At the heart of each student’s experience is a use-inspired project in one of several different areas of research employing biology-inspired approaches. These include: i) harvesting and conversion of energy, ii) designing nanoscale interfaces to measure and influence living systems, iii) newly designed sustainable green materials, and iv) development of adaptive metabolic systems and functional materials for therapeutic and industrial use. These investigations will span theoretical, computational, and experimental approaches. The project will prepare CUNY Ph.D. students for STEM careers in industrial, government, academic, and entrepreneurial tracks by integrating career awareness throughout the training period. The training plan is based on an innovative Integrating Mental Models and Experimental Research in Scientific Education (IMMERSE) training model, designed to create a learning community of systems thinkers. In this model, participants exchange knowledge and communicate across unfamiliar concepts, cultures, and methods. The IMMERSE training model can be replicated at other universities and in other convergent research areas. The NSF Research Traineeship (NRT) Program is designed to encourage the development and implementation of bold, new potentially transformative models for STEM graduate education training. The program is dedicated to effective training of STEM graduate students in high priority interdisciplinary or convergent research areas through comprehensive traineeship models that are innovative, evidence-based, and aligned with changing workforce and research needs. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.