REU Site: Interactive Biomaterials

This site is supported by the Department of Defense in partnership with the NSF REU program.

NON-TECHNICAL DESCRIPTION: The Interactive Biomaterials Research Experiences for Undergraduates site (REU Site) trains cohorts of students from across the country in state-of-the-art biomaterials research to prepare them for future careers in biomaterials science and engineering. This REU Site (1) engages students in independent, leading-edge biomaterials research projects conducted in multidisciplinary and collaborative laboratory environments; (2) provides mentoring opportunities and network-building experiences to excite participants about the societal impacts of careers available to them following graduate education; (3) prepares students to be effective communicators to public and scientific audiences, and (4) creates a welcoming and diverse training environment that promotes the inclusion of all participants.

Complementing training in cutting-edge research techniques, students receive one-on-one mentoring from faculty advisors and graduate student mentors and participate in technical writing workshops and team-building activities. A signature element of the REU Site is its career mentoring initiative for doctoral-level industrial and academic career paths, further emphasizing the importance and benefits of graduate education in STEM disciplines.

Students also give regular presentations about their research and deliver a formal presentation at a culminating, university-wide research symposium. The REU Site leadership especially encourages the participation of students with limited research opportunities, women, underrepresented minorities, and disabilities to expand their access to these career-enhancing opportunities.

With the support of faculty and graduate student mentors and their peers, students develop and enhance their skills in essential areas such as networking, working in research teams, and communicating orally and technically in various formats. Best practices emerging from this REU Site are broadly disseminated via the web and educational publications to enable replication at other future REU sites.

TECHNICAL DETAILS: Biomaterials are increasingly designed to be stimulus-responsive, where their properties can change in a controlled way in response to thermal, chemical, or mechanical stimuli in their environment. These interactions between materials and the biological environment, which occur at atomic, molecular, cellular, microscopic, and macroscopic levels, dictate biomaterials’ performance both in vitro and in vivo.

The research projects available to students advance knowledge of these fundamental interactions in areas that include: shape memory and stimulus-responsive polymers, nanoparticle drug delivery, the collective behavior of bacterial biofilms, cell-biomaterial interactions, stem-cell research, biocompatible soft robots, 3D printing of microfluidic devices, and computational modeling of biomaterials. These hypothesis-driven, multidisciplinary research projects draw upon the collective expertise of faculty, and in many cases, foster collaborative research across faculty laboratories, academic departments, and institutions.

Faculty mentors are highly qualified to mentor undergraduate students in their laboratories; each has a vast array of modern facilities, equipment, and computational resources at their disposal for training these students in cutting-edge research using analytical and computational techniques. Students develop technical skills and expertise to appreciate the complexity of these interactive biomaterials and understand how to harness these materials for advanced technologies, preparing them to pursue advanced study for careers in various sectors and settings.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.