GENERAL INFO

While many recognize the need for future biomedical research projects to be conducted by interdisciplinary teams, our conventional science and engineering educational programs do little to prepare students to contribute in such environments. The goal of this project is to prepare students from engineering and the physical sciences to work at the interfaces between those disciplines and biology in areas such as bionanotechnology. We have devised four programs to meet this challenge: a summer academy for high school students, freshman seminars in bionanotechnology, a biology course for physical scientists and engineers, and a summer internship program for engineers and physicists.

The high school summer academy will target students at the predominantly Hispanic Science Academy of South Texas as well as inner-city schools in Houston.  Students will be engaged in interdisciplinary research early on, paired with graduate students conducting research in bionanotechnology for hands-on exposure to the research environment, and will also attend lectures and field trips. The goal of this program is to increase the pipeline of qualified students pursuing careers in science and engineering.

The freshmen seminars in bionanotechnology will be held for both science and nonscience majors at Rice University. The courses will be taught by postdoctoral fellows to allow very small class sizes for interactive discussions, with the goal of sparking interest in interdisciplinary science topics early in the educational process and elucidating the linkages between disciplines. The postdoctoral fellows involved in this program will be engaged in a teacher training program before and during their time in the classroom.

A single-semester accelerated course will teach key concepts of modern cell and molecular biology to undergraduates at Rice University majoring in engineering, computer science, mathematics, physics, or chemistry. The goal is to enable students with expertise in nanotechnology or related technological disciplines to apply their knowledge to biological or medical problems. The course will be taught using numerous technology case studies to provide examples of bionanotechnology and help these students understand how concepts in their field of study can be applied within the biological sciences.

The summer internship program for undergraduates majoring in engineering and the physical sciences, especially women and underrepresented minorities, consists of a three-week intensive biology lecture and laboratory course teaching cell culture, basic molecular biology, and protein biochemistry. The course is intended to provide students arriving with little knowledge of biology with a background and laboratory skill base sufficient to allow them to start to participate as part of a team conducting interdisciplinary research in bionanotechnology. The course is followed by eight weeks of bionanotechnology research within laboratories at Rice University. This program will recruit students nationwide.