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Hoping to spark rapid advancements in biotechnology and nurture young researchers from diverse fields of study, the University of California Systemwide Biotechnology Research and Education Program has awarded 11 new training grants to graduate students and their faculty mentors at ºÙºÙÊÓƵ and four other UC campuses.

The $50,000-per-year Graduate Research and Education in Adaptive bioTechnology (GREAT) training grants are among the highest individual awards given for graduate education and training anywhere in the nation. They will fund biotechnology-related research into such areas as nanoscale bio-imaging, stem cells, biological molecular machines and nerve-tissue engineering, which incorporate cross-disciplinary training that spans all fields of science, engineering, medicine and agriculture.

"This training grant program is a spirited competition that encompasses top-flight candidates from all of the UC campuses," said Martina Newell McGloughlin, director of the UC Biotechnology Research and Education Program. "Its goal is to create novel training opportunities for graduate students in diverse fields that will encourage the next generation of innovations."

Grant recipients were selected according to their demonstrated ability to understand and solve problems that cross diverse disciplines.

At ºÙºÙÊÓƵ, three training grants were awarded to:

• Mathematics student Roy Wollman, who is working on a system level analysis of the mitotic machinery under the sponsorship of Professor Jonathan Scholey;
• Chemistry student Jennifer Cash, who is developing linear-dendritic polymers as scaffolds for nerve-tissue engineering with Professor Timothy Patten;
• Biomedical engineering student Babak Sanii, who is using mechanical curvature to promote membrane fusion in Professor Atul Parikh's laboratory;

The other training grants were awarded to:

UC Berkeley

• Biophysics student Jesse Dill, who is performing single-molecule studies of protein folding dynamics under the direction of Professor Susan Marqusee;
• Biophysics student Eliane Trepagnier, who is designing a model system to study the translocation of single biopolymers through pores and cavities in biological molecular machines in the laboratory of Professor Jan Liphardt;

UC Irvine

• Biochemical engineering student Amy Hellman, who is researching the development of a laser microbeam/microscope platform for rapid single cell bioanalytics under the direction of Professor Vasan Venugopalan;

UCLA

• Electrical engineering student Margaret Chiang, who is developing a light microscope for sub-diffraction nanoscale bio-imaging under the sponsorship of Professor Jia-Ming Liu;
• Biomedical engineering student Ryan Schmidt, whose research is in the area of locus-specific chip-ms, an innovative new technology for studying epigenetic gene regulation during stem cell differentiation, with Professor Yi Eve Sun;

UC San Diego

• Bioinformatics student Alice Kiselyuk, who is doing high-throughput screening for compounds that regulate beta-cell proliferation under the sponsorship of Professor Fred Levine;
• Biomedical engineering student Karen Wei, who is designing a 3-D tissue culture platform in Professor Andrew McCulloch's laboratory; and
• Bioengineering student Megan Blewis, who is studying bioengineering joints as a platform for biotechnology and biomaterial therapies under the direction of Professor Robert Sah.

The GREAT program, developed three years ago, supports the training of the brightest young UC graduate students in theoretical and experimental research at the interface between the life sciences and the physical, chemical, engineering, mathematical and computational sciences. Nine University of California campuses have now been awarded one or more of these prestigious systemwide grants. The only campus that has yet to receive a GREAT training grant is the newly opened UC Merced.

This year, the program graduates its first trainees, whose notable accomplishments include those of Adam Siepel, now an assistant professor at Cornell University, who has applied new computational methods for the detection of functional elements in the human genome, reducing the number of protein-coding genes from an initially estimated 35,000 to between 20,000 and 25,000. His work, published in the journal Nature, was made possible by the GREAT program.

Another success story is that of current trainee Fulai Lin, a graduate student at UCLA who is developing a revolutionary system for mapping proteins, which is of key importance in the area of systems biology. His work was performed in conjunction with San Diego-based Invitrogen.