A $1 million grant from the
Howard Hughes Medical
Institute will help create a new graduate training
program in Nanotechnology for Biology and Medicine at Johns
Hopkins. The NBMed program will provide interdisciplinary
training in nanotechnology and biology to a new generation
of graduate students from three schools within Johns
Hopkins. The goal is to provide a broader range of
knowledge and skills to people embarking on careers in
biology and medicine.
Drawing from doctoral students in nine departments in
the schools of Engineering, Arts and Sciences, and
Medicine, the program is designed to help researchers
acquire expertise in more than one academic area, giving
them the tools needed to develop new biomaterials, drug
delivery systems, biosensors and diagnostic devices.
"We want to train scientists and engineers so they can
use nanotechnology to produce advances in biology and
medicine," said
Denis Wirtz, who will serve as director of the program.
"To solve many of the toughest problems in diagnosing and
treating patients, we need researchers who have outstanding
skills in more than one discipline. For example, making
tiny particles to carry drugs directly to diseased cells
may require training in materials science as well as
biology. But traditionally, researchers in these fields
have not shared the same language or lab skills. We want to
change that."
Toward this goal, the program will be led by faculty
members with a range of expertise. Wirtz is a professor of
chemical and
biomolecular engineering. Co-directors are Peter
Devreotes, director of
cell biology in the School of
Medicine; Kathleen Stebe, a professor in the Whiting
School's Department of Chemical and Biomolecular
Engineering; Peter Searson, a professor in the Whiting
School's Department of Materials
Science and Engineering; and Michael Edidin, a
professor in the Krieger School's Department of
Biology.
The Howard Hughes grant will be disbursed over three
years, enabling the university to set up the program, open
a new state-of-the-art lab for characterizing
nanoparticles, recruit two faculty members with
interdisciplinary skills and prepare Web-based education
modules that can be used by college students elsewhere, as
well as by researchers in private industry.
By the third year, the program will begin enrolling
its first doctoral students. Each will be based in one of
the participating science, engineering or medical
departments and will be required to take extra classroom
and lab courses outside the traditional area of study. Each
student will have two faculty advisers from different
academic departments, guiding him or her toward completion
of a thesis that reflects an interdisciplinary topic.
The program comes in response to a growing recognition
that many new advances in medical diagnostics and treatment
will require new discoveries and tools developed by
scientists and engineers working in the physical sciences,
often at microscopic scales. The new graduate program will
complement an upcoming research initiative at Johns
Hopkins, the establishment of an
Institute for
NanoBiotechnology.
"Johns Hopkins is extremely well-positioned for these
projects because of our faculty's strength in medicine and
nanotechnology," Wirtz said. "We can draw on a lot of
world-class expertise in these areas."
The graduate program proposal prepared by Wirtz and
his colleagues was among 132 submitted to the Howard Hughes
Medical Institute. Only 10 of these proposals received
funding, representatives of the institute said. The $1
million grant is aimed at establishing the
interdisciplinary program at Johns Hopkins and positioning
it to obtain additional financial support from the National
Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering of the
National Institutes of Health.
The Howard Hughes Medical Institute is a nonprofit
medical research organization established in 1953 by the
aviator-industrialist. The institute, headquartered in
Chevy Chase, Md., is one of the largest philanthropies in
the world with an endowment of $14.8 billion at the close
of its 2005 fiscal year. The institute spent $483 million
in support of biomedical research and $80 million for
support of a variety of science education and other grants
programs in fiscal 2005.