Training the next-gen workforce in standards development with $30 million grant
The grant from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) will be shared between Ƶ, Johns Hopkins University and Morgan State University.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has awarded a five-year Professional Research Experience Program (PREP) grant of $30 million to Ƶ, Johns Hopkins University (the lead institute for the grant) and Morgan State University.
The award will allow the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Ƶ to send a faculty member, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate and undergraduate students to NIST every year for the next five years to conduct collaborative research in standards development.
The grant provides the opportunity for Ƶ to partner with NIST, a non-regulatory agency of the United States Department of Commerce, and the two other universities involved to develop standards for regenerative medicine and biomaterial manufacturing.
“This exciting program will enable Binghamton students, postdocs and faculty researchers to gain vital laboratory experience and play a role in advancing the field of biomedical engineering,” said Bahgat Sammakia, vice president for research at Binghamton. “Collaboration is a vital part of any researcher’s career, and it’s fantastic to see a program that puts our students and scholars in a position to work on projects of national significance.”
The principal investigator (PI) from Ƶ is Professor Kaiming Ye from the Biomedical Engineering Department. Ye, also the director of Ƶ’s Center of Biomanufacturing for Regenerative Medicine (CBRM), will be working with $5 million of the grant.
“This program is a natural fit for what we’ve been doing in CBRM,” said Ye. “The center was established to identify and define standards for cell biomanufacturing and tissue biofabrication and has been working with scientists at the Biosystems and Biomaterials division of NIST to accomplish this.”
The three universities will also help the researchers trained through the grant to connect with each other to further advance the field.
“The grant will provide a learning opportunity, a way to network with fellow researchers and a chance to better define the standards that all researchers will use in regenerative medicine and biomaterial manufacturing. It’s important that Ƶ gets to be a part of that,” said Ye.