A $1 million grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute will allow a new graduate program in nanotechnology for biology and medicine to receive its first doctoral students in three years.
Based around nine departments in the schools of Engineering, Arts and Sciences, and Medicine, researchers will be able to gain expertise in a variety of areas, learn a broader range of skills and gain an extensive interdisciplinary education. This sort of education will encourage the development of new drug delivery systems, biosensors, diagnostic devices and biomaterials by researchers.
"Most of the things that cells do in the body depend on clusters of molecules, not on single molecules," said Michael Edidin, one of the program's co-directors and a biology professor.
"The size of these clusters is nanoscale. So, if you can make tools and probes to interact with the molecules you can do a lot to understand how they work," he added. With emphasis on nanotechnology, the program hopes to train scientists and engineers to create new advances in biology and medicine.
The new program will be able to develop instruments needed to do medical work in treating and diagnosing conditions that take place on a microscopic scale.
As Edidin describes it, "The HHMI grant is to plan a training program that graduates researchers comfortable with both the engineering and applied physics needed to work the nanoscale and with the biology."
"Johns Hopkins is extremely well-positioned for these projects because of our faculty's strength in medicine and nanotechnology," Professor Denis Wirtz said in a recent press release. "We can draw on a lot of world-class expertise in these areas."
The program will be directed by Wirtz, who is also a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering. The co-directors include Peter Devreotes, director of cell biology at the School of Medicine; Kathleen Stebe, a professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering; Peter Searson, a professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering; and Edidin.
The group of directors has decided to use the grant over a three-year period. This will allow the program's creation and development, the recruitment of two new faculty members and the building of a new state-of-the-art lab to characterize nanoparticles in the first two years. In its third year, the first class of graduate students will be admitted to the program's participating science, engineering or medical departments.
As per the program's aims, each student will take courses in the classroom and lab that are outside his or her area of study and he or she will have two faculty advisers from different academic departments. In order to graduate from the program, every student will have to compose a thesis on an interdisciplinary topic.
