Achievement

Trainee Mark Lemos served as a team lead for a grant submitted to the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance (NCIIA). Fellow IGERT trainee Steve Zicari is part of the team for the NCIIA grant. The team was awarded $20,000.00, which has allowed establishment of cultures of over ten duckweed species from around the world. The trainees have trained five undergraduate students associated with their project (pursuing degrees in chemical engineering, biomedical engineering, biochemical engineering, and biochemistry and molecular biology) and three of the students are still actively involved in the research. In January, part of the team attended Social Innovation Boot Camp at the University of Texas at Austin to evaluate routes to commercialization if scientific milestones and economic levels of enzyme expression are achieved.