Project Profile
IGERT: Biophotonics Across Energy, Space, and Time (BEST)
University of California at Irvine
Abstract
BEST is an NSF funded Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) program that initiates a novel model for interdisciplinary graduate training in Biophotonics. Our intent is to attract trainees with a diverse set of acadmic backgrounds across the biomedical sciences, physical sciences, and engineering who share a passion to… more »
BEST is an NSF funded Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) program that initiates a novel model for interdisciplinary graduate training in Biophotonics. Our intent is to attract trainees with a diverse set of acadmic backgrounds across the biomedical sciences, physical sciences, and engineering who share a passion to develop and utilize new photonic methods to measure, image, probe, and manipulate biological components, processes, and systems.
The importance of biophotonic technologies in the biomedical sciences is unmistakable. Their utilization in the life sciences and medicine represents an estimated annual economic impact of $50 billion. This IGERT aims to produce the next generation of biophotonics leaders to make transformative advances in the development and application of new tools for biological and medical discovery and maintain global U.S. leadership in biotechnology, pharmaceutical and medical device industries.
BEST IGERT is a hands-on graduate training program that integrates physics, chemistry, engineering, and life-science principles across spatial and temporal scales. BEST trainees will be able to specialize in one of the five areas: Microscopy and Microbeams, Wide-field Functional Imaging, Diffuse Optics, Biophotonics Modeling and Computation, Multi-Scale Molecular Probes. The interaction of, and collaboration between, biomedical scientists, physical scientists and engineers throughout the graduate education will drive advances in biophotonics technologies, computational methods, and molecular probes to solve important problems in bio-molecular, cellular, tissue, and whole organismal systems.
IGERT is an NSF-wide program intended to meet the challenges of educating U.S. Ph.D. scientists and engineers with the interdisciplinary background, deep knowledge in a chosen discipline, and the technical, professional, and personal skills needed for the career demands of the future. The program is intended to establish new models for graduate education and training in a fertile environment for collaborative research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries, and to engage students in understanding the processes by which research is translated to innovations for societal benefit. « less
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