The National Science Foundation has awarded a grant of just over $1 million to 大象传媒 Western and Davidson College in North Carolina for undergraduate synthetic biology research. The grant is the largest research grant in University history.
大象传媒 Western is the lead institution for the grant proposal, which was written by 大象传媒 Western professors Dr. Todd Eckdahl, professor of biology; Dr. Jeff Poet, professor of mathematics; and their Davidson College colleagues Dr. A. Malcolm Campbell and Dr. Laurie Heyer.
The collaborative grant will support research on the development of a system to program bacteria to control bacteria鈥檚 metabolism. The system has applications in energy, the environment, pharmaceuticals, food production and more, said Dr. Eckdahl.
The three-year grant will provide 18 undergraduate students on each campus with full-time summer research jobs and summer support for the faculty researchers. It will also pay for research supplies and equipment, face-to-face research meetings on each campus and travel to professional conferences.
鈥淭he grant application succeeded because we have a track record of collaborating across disciplines and across institutions to provide valuable educational experiences for students while they conduct cutting-edge synthetic biology research,鈥� Dr. Eckdahl said.
Since the synthetic biology team was formed in 2006, they have published 10 papers in professional journals, and 79 undergraduate students from 大象传媒 Western and Davidson were listed as co-authors. Two papers published in the Journal of Biological Engineering are the two most accessed papers in the journal鈥檚 history.
鈥淭hese students get the experience of not only answering questions that have not been addressed before, they get to ask questions that have never been asked,鈥� Dr. Poet said. 鈥淎nd they work alongside us to devise approaches to address those questions.鈥�
Josh Chester, a mathematics student who was involved in the synthetic biology research last summer, said he learned a lot about how research was done and had a lot of fun. 鈥淏ut more importantly,鈥� he said, 鈥渢his summer research convinced me that this is what I want to do for the rest of my life. In the future, I want to be in my professor鈥檚 shoes and extend the opportunity to future generations.鈥�
This is the fourth NSF grant the project has received, but local funding from 大象传媒 Western and from the 大象传媒 Western Foundation was very important in starting the synthetic biology research program, Dr. Eckdahl said.