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NO DAY AT THE BEACH: ‘BIOMAP’ DIRECTS STUDENTS TO SUMMER RESEARCH OPPORTUNITY AT IOWA STATE

 

While many choose between mountains or seashore, a handful of undergraduates from across the U.S. and Mexico chose instead to spend summer 2006 in the prairie heat as part of Iowa State’s Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU).

The three-year National Science Foundation program brought sixteen students to Ames for 10 weeks to focus on biological materials and processes—or BioMaP, an international REU jointly administered with Mexico’s Tecnológico de Monterrey/ITESM. This year’s cohort included three students from Monterrey and two who split their time between Ames and the Mexican campus on projects jointly supervised by Iowa State and Monterrey faculty.

According to REU program director Balaji Narasimhan, an associate professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering (CBE), Iowa State had no trouble getting young people to spend their summers in Iowa, attracting around 100 candidates for the ten NSF-funded spots. “The applications we got were really wonderful,” Narasimhan says. “If we had more money, we would happily have taken another ten.”

Undergraduates participating in the REU came from schools as diverse as Stanford, Manhattan College, the University of Oklahoma, Northwestern, the South Dakota School of Mines, and Penn State, among others. And while many of the students were aspiring chemical engineers, the cohort also included biomedical and biological engineers, as well as several pre-med students.

“The REU exposes undergraduates to the excitement of research and discovery through independent work,” says Narasimhan. “But it also provides a cohort experience where you bring together 16 people for 10 weeks and thrust them into this invigorating research environment where they’re all working on these open-ended new problems—in our case, the biological engineering area.”

Students already know projects and advisers they want to work with and provide a list of their top three preferences as part of their applications. Once selected, they work in teams with other REU students, grad students, postdocs, and their primary mentors. In addition to lab work, the students take short courses on ethics and safety, as well as technical writing and communications. On August 4, the student researchers presented their findings during a poster session held in the atrium of the Molecular Biology Building.

Skipping the mountains and the ocean for a summer of research in Iowa may have been a somewhat easier choice for Ryan Erickson and Lily Ayo Roberts, two students who worked on projects supervised by CBE professor Surya Mallapragada: Erickson is a junior chemical engineering major at the University of Colorado at Boulder, while Roberts has plenty of opportunities (if not time) for a day at the beach as a junior major in biomechanical engineering at Stanford University in California.
Both Erickson and Roberts grounded their research in Mallapragada’s studies of the differentiation of adult stem cells to encourage regeneration of the neuronal pathways critical for restoring function to damaged peripheral nervous systems. Unlike the more flexible but politically controversial embryonic stem cells, adult hippocampal progenitor cells (AHPCs) can only differentiate into several types of cells. Through the use of extracellular matrices and nano-patterned substrates, the researchers hope to encourage the development of the AHPCs into neurons.
“We’ve gotten a lot of interesting results,” notes Erickson, who split his time between Ames and Monterrey. His experience with the REU has reinforced his decision to continue on to graduate school—perhaps even to Iowa State. “I definitely like this experiment and this research,” he adds, “so we’ll have to see.”

Roberts also plans on graduate study, although the possibility of attending medical school would direct her some place other than Iowa State. Still, the research she’s conducted with Mallapragada’s group has opened her eyes to possibilities in medicine that extend well beyond clinical practice. In fact, she says, her work isn’t finished, and she may return to Ames in September to wrap up.

“It’s been fun; I’ve really enjoyed it,” says Roberts. “I had no idea how to do cell cultures or to take these images and stains of antibodies.” More than just these basic skills, she adds, the REU gave her the opportunity to see herself as part of a larger effort within a highly collegial setting. “My studies built on previous research,” Roberts observes. “I really liked that it was a continuation of a bigger project.”

The integration of undergraduate research into the mainline projects of some of the top people in their fields is what makes the REU both valuable and appealing for students such as Erickson and Roberts. Indeed, Narasimhan notes, more than a merely “academic” exercise, the NSF evaluates the success of individual REU programs on the publications generated with undergraduate involvement, as well as the numbers of REU students who proceed to graduate or medical school.

And, Narasimhan acknowledges, the program has other benefits as well: “It’s a wonderful recruiting tool for Iowa State.”

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