NRT-URoL: Emergent Intelligence Research for Graduate Excellence in Biological and Bio-Inspired Systems (EmIRGE-Bio)

Many of our society’s most pressing challenges – including food security, sustainability, and supporting aging populations – will require breakthroughs in biotechnology and bio-inspired science. This National Science Foundation Research Traineeship (NRT) award to Syracuse University will train a new generation of scientists and engineers who can evaluate and harness complex systems, such as biological tissues or next-generation materials, to drive intelligent responses such as sensing, actuating, and learning, leading to breakthrough technologies.

The project anticipates training 115 PhD students, including 37 funded trainees, from fields that span the life and physical sciences and engineering. The innovative, team-based curriculum and research program will build STEM workforce capacity by training people who thrive on high-performing interdisciplinary teams, where each member of the team contributes unique and deep disciplinary expertise while still communicating their knowledge across a diverse team to drive discoveries not possible within a single discipline.

This project will train Ph.D. students to identify and characterize emergent behaviors through several applications that cross-cut biology and materials design. Since biological organisms harness the emergent behavior of components at small scales to generate intelligent structures that perform tasks at large scales, similar principles can be used to design new intelligent materials and devices.

The program curriculum supports the interaction between biology and material design fields by first training students in core disciplinary competencies, then providing explicit curricular training in interdisciplinary team building via the evidence-driven “Team-Based Learning” paradigm, and ultimately engaging students on research teams with world-expert faculty from diverse disciplinary backgrounds. These teams will approach difficult problems from new perspectives and transfer useful tools and techniques between the life sciences and materials design.

The project also provides longitudinal entrepreneurship training so that students are able to commercialize their discoveries and work in industrial settings. This training will help students bring their research discoveries to market to help address grand societal challenges such as those in sustainability and healthcare. The project will also have impact beyond the local workforce, by implementing, assessing, and disseminating a successful curriculum for training students in team-based research focused on emergent intelligence.

The NSF Research Traineeship (NRT) Program is designed to encourage the development and implementation of bold, new potentially transformative models for STEM graduate education training. The program is dedicated to effective training of STEM graduate students in high priority interdisciplinary or convergent research areas through comprehensive traineeship models that are innovative, evidence-based, and aligned with changing workforce and research needs.

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.