Integrative Graduate
Education and
Research Traineeship

Highlight

LifeChips Seminar Series

Seminar Series Speaker

Projects:

IGERT: Life Chip

Institution:

University of California at Irvine

Primary Strategic Goal:

Discovery: Foster research that will advance the frontiers of knowledge, emphasizing areas of greatest opportunity and potential benefit and establishing the Nation as a global leader in fundamental transformational science and engineering.

Secondary Strategic Goal:

Learning: Build the Nation's research capability through critical investments in advanced instrumentation, facilities, cyber infrastructure, and experimental tools.

Achievement/Results

The NSF funded IGERT-LifeChips program at The University of California, Irvine continues to host the LifeChips Seminar Series which features research presentations from top faculty members from large variety of scientific backgrounds. Seminar speakers travel from their home departments and, at times, across the country to speak at these highly anticipated seminars. During this reporting period, seminar speakers have come from as close as the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at UCI and as far as the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Tufts University.

During this reporting period the following speakers have been featured in our LifeChips Seminar Series:

• On January 21, 2011, Dr. Lisa A. Flanagan from the Sue and Bill Gross Stem Cell Research Center and the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at UCI gave a lecture titled “Electric Fields and Microfluidics Reveal Stem Cell Fate Potential.”

• Dr. Andrej Luptak from the Sue and Bill Gross Stem Cell Research and Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine presented his lecture, “New Methods in Selection of Fluorophore Producing RNA,” on January 28, 2011.

• We were proud to host Professor Fiorenzo Omenetto on February 25, 2011. Professor Omenetto works in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Tufts University. His lecture was titled “Silk-New Opportunities for an Ancient Material.”

• On March 11, 2011 we hosted Alexander Groisman from the Department of Physics at The University of California, San Diego. He presented his lecture titled, “Microfluidic Devices for Cell Biology.”

• Professor Clare Yu from the Department of Physics and Astronomy was our guest speaker on April 8, 2011. She presented her lecture titled, “Regulation of Growth in the Developing Dresophila Wing Disc by Mechanical Interactions between Cells.”

• On April 22, 2011, Professor Peter Kaiser from the Department of Biological Chemistry at The University of California, Irvine, presented his lecture titled, “Tools for Proteomics and Protein Design.”

Address Goals

The LifeChips seminar series promotes the NSF goal of discovery by giving seminar speakers a chance to share current research finding and possibly form collaborations with other professors and students in the community. It promotes interdisciplinary learning by exposing the general public to a variety of research finding from the schools of engineering, medicine, and life sciences.