Achievement

The INCBN IGERT program encourages collaboration among departments and scientists who may not have otherwise interacted with each other. This approach has directly impacted the first year of graduate school of Patrick Johnson, a Trainee and a Ph.D. student in the Chemical Engineering, by allowing him to work in a biomaterials laboratory setting, while establishing links with the schools of Medicine and Pharmacy. This connection is vital to understanding the mechanism of vaccine delivery, which is the goal of his research, combining materials science with biological organisms and solid-state chemistry. The courses he has taken, offered by Chemical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Biology, and a graduate program in Nanoscience and Microsystems, span a variety of disciplines. This has introduced him to a broad range of topics in bioengineering and nanomaterials that he would have lacked had he been working in a specific department without the IGERT interdisciplinary emphasis.