A growing field becomes a nexus joining engineering, biology and the liberal arts
Union is unique. We hear that about many aspects of Union College such as the Minerva House System and the strong undergraduate research programs. But it is Union’s noted liberal arts curriculum in concert with the strong engineering program that may be the College’s defining feature, according to Cherrice A. Traver, dean of engineering.
“The combination of a liberal arts education and an engineering degree puts Union in a league of its own,” Traver said. “There are just not that many small, selective colleges with accredited engineering programs.”
Union currently has 260 students in electrical, computer and mechanical engineering and is seeking to boost bioengineering from a minor to an academic major. That process began with help from a $1.6 million grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and has been fueled by a growing demand among students and college-bound high school students. The College has created new bioengineering labs and hired faculty with hopes of establishing an accredited bioengineering major as soon as 2010. The degree would prepare students for careers in the medical industry, research fields and government regulatory agencies.
“We need to broaden our program offerings,” Traver said. “The three that we have are successful and we would love for bioengineering to be the next program we offer. It’s a small field but is growing rapidly.”
In early February The Center for Bioengineering and Computational Biology, located in Butterfield Hall, was christened during a formal ceremony. Professor Leo J. Fleishman, chairman of the Biology Department, cut the ceremonial ribbon to mark the opening. Fleishman was instrumental in securing the $1.6 million grant in 2003 to renovate Butterfield Hall.
“The program is well funded, we have a lot of faculty interest in the field, and several student projects are underway. It’s rewarding to see faculty members from different departments working together,” Fleishman said.
There is a tradition of interaction between engineers and biologists at Union College, according to Steven K. Rice, associate professor of biology. Professors in biology and electrical and computer engineering have worked on collaborative projects that predate the bioengineering program, and several past mechanical engineering senior thesis projects have had a biology component.
In December 2000 Robert Balmer, who was then dean of Engineering, developed the Converging Technologies Initiative. That initiative has developed interdisciplinary programs between engineering and liberal arts. The plan for Converging Technologies was presented to the Union community early in 2001, and through the next year faculty from biology, engineering and liberal arts departments met to develop courses and programs to support the initiative. Four areas were initially chosen for development: bioengineering, mechatronics, nanotechnology and pervasive computing. In September 2002 Doug Klein was appointed director of the Center for Converging Technologies.
“It’s been very exciting,” Klein said. “We have a great group of people working in these areas and they’re all so enthusiastic. I’m not an engineer, I’m an economist, but one of the things I found attractive about Union when I first came here was the combination of liberal arts and engineering. The Converging Technologies initiative was Union’s first high-level commitment to putting those pieces together, and it’s great to be part of that.”
The interest in bioengineering at Union can also be traced back to Dick Shanebrook, professor of mechanical engineering, who retired in 2001. Shanebrook had taught a biomechanics course and had a long history of working in cardiovascular biomechanics. Rice co-taught the biomechanics course with Shanebrook for one term, and then Rice and Professor Mohammad Mafi turned that course into what is now called Introduction to Bioengineering.
FUNDING FOR BIOENGINEERING
Faculty and students were enthusiastic, but money was – and still is – needed to help support the bioengineering effort. The College secured a grant from the Mellon Foundation to fund interdisciplinary education and in 2002 Klein allocated money from that grant to support each of the four areas covered by the Converging Technologies Initiative.
“This was seed money meant to help develop the initial courses in each area,” Klein explained. “The course Introduction to Bioengineering was developed with this money.”
But more money was needed if the bioengineering program was going to really take off.
In 2003 the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, commonly called HHMI, announced a call for grant proposals that was a perfect fit with Union’s bioengineering effort. At the same time, the National Academies Press published a national report on the future of the biological sciences, entitled BIO2010: Transforming Undergraduate Education for Future Research Biologists.
“Our interest in converging technologies, our intention to bring more quantitative lab exercises into biology courses, and our efforts to form interdisciplinary relationships between departments at Union all matched closely with what the national report suggested as important in biology education,” Fleishman said. “So we tailored our HHMI grant application in that direction, and it turned out to be just what was needed.”
The faculty will submit a second HHMI grant application this fall.
"It’s very exciting – we have so many good ideas that we hope to keep funded and staffed,” Rice said.
Perhaps the most exciting – and most costly – outcome of this effort was the development of The Center for Bioengineering and Computational Biology, located on the first floor of Butterfield Hall. The Center comprises a teaching studio and lab; a smaller lab that will house the Virtual Bioengineering Center; a research lab for Professor Scott Kirkton, a new faculty member who was hired with grant money; an administrative office; and a design lab. Several other bioengineering faculty, Professors Andy Rapoff (mechanical engineering) and Shane Cotter (electrical and computer engineering) have labs on the second floor of Butterfield that are part of the bioengineering center.
The Bioengineering Design Lab is available to faculty at Union and also to researchers and faculty at other colleges and universities. “One of the goals of the HHMI grant was to develop relationships with other institutions,” Rice said. “One way to do that is to assist other researchers and faculty in implementing engineering approaches to biological problems. With our design lab we can provide that assistance.”
A bioengineering minor was introduced in 2005, and is an option for students majoring in biology, engineering, and some other fields, with slightly different requirements for each group. Students are required to take a minimum of six core courses outside of their major and have a choice of upper-level courses. Rice and Rapoff are co-directors of the program. Bioengineering minors also must do an independent research project during their senior year.
“There are two ways to be interdisciplinary,” Fleishman said. “One is to carve out a narrow area at the intersection of the two disciplines, which is the way most bioengineering programs operate. The other is to draw on the breadth and depth of both fields, to really bridge the two disciplines. That’s where Union is heading.”
Helen Hanson, faculty member who will begin work in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department in fall 2007, works on computer modeling of human speech, which will add to the bioengineering effort. Hanson’s research involves links between speech-producing organs, the speech signal and the cognitive representation of an utterance.
“To understand these relationships, we model things such as the way vocal folds vibrate and the properties of the vocal tract tissues, and we can use electric circuit and transmission line theory to do that,” Hanson explained. “I’m a Union alum – class of 1983 – so joining the faculty is kind of a homecoming for me.”
Electrical and mechanical engineering programs are generally made up of about 10 to 12 percent women, while bioengineering programs have close to 50 percent, according to Ron Bucinell, associate professor and chair of the Mechanical Engineering Department. Bucinell is optimistic about the future of bioengineering at Union.
“Bioengineering is becoming a bona fide discipline within engineering,” Bucinell said. “Before it was a mix of biology and engineering, but we are now really getting engineers involved in working on biological problems. This is particularly important in dealing with the medical issues around an aging population. And it’s a discipline that attracts women. Studies have shown that women are attracted to fields in which the work product benefits people, bioengineering is clearly that type of field.”
SUPPORTING STUDENT RESEARCH
A large part of the bioengineering effort is encouraging students to participate in research projects, an area in which Union’s relationships with other institutions has paid off. Using the HMMI grant, Union sent seven students to labs at other institutions in 2006 for summer research projects and four more were set to go this summer.
"In the original HHMI grant application we had agreements with RPI, Syracuse University, and the Wadsworth Center at the University of Albany to take on summer research students,” Fleishman said. “The students we’ve sent to those places have had great experiences and we have students lined up for summer research at all three again. We’re also branching out, looking for labs at other institutions where students with particular interests might be able to do research. This year we have a student going to the University of Pennsylvania.”
The grant also supports student research at Union, through a team research approach. Faculty teams made up of professors of biology, engineering, physics, mathematics, or another quantitative field, write a proposal to be submitted to our internal review committee. Their proposal must include two students to work on a project over the summer and through the next school year.
Fleishman has an ongoing project with Professor Mike Rudko in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, which has involved several students over the years. Biology Lecturer Brian Cohen collaborated with Associate Professor Seyffie Maleki in the Physics Department on a project that included two students.
“Several of our students have presented their research at national meetings,” says Cohen. “That’s a great benefit of being at a school like Union.”
Biology Professor Robert Olberg used some HHMI money to have Zohny S. Zohny ’06 work with him during the summer of 2006. The goal of Olberg’s ongoing project is to use what is known about the nervous system of a cockroach to develop an effective means for remote control of locomotion.
“The overall goal of this project is to outfit a cockroach with a small backpack with a transceiver and electrical stimulation circuitry,” explained Olberg. “Then we can remotely control individual cockroaches and use them as ‘intelligent robots.’ For example, we could send a cockroach with the appropriate remote sensors into places that humans, or even small robots, are unable to go – they could be used to locate victims under the rubble of buildings destroyed in earthquakes.”
Another exciting aspect of the HHMI funding is the newly created position of post-baccalaureate scholar, designed to give a recent Union graduate experience while they plan their next career move. Adam Pallus ’05 was the first scholar.
“We had a very productive year together and got some interesting results. Adam and I traveled to Russia to present the results at an international meeting. It was quite an accomplishment for a recent graduate,” Fleishman said.
COURSE DEVELOPMENT
Introduction to Bioengineering was the first course in the bioengineering program, and in the winter term of 2007 the second course in Bioinformatics was created. That course was taught by Biology Professor Steve Horton and Computer Science Professor Chris Fernandes. Half of the students in this course were biology majors; the other half were computer science majors.
“I think the course went well for its first term. We didn’t know how it would go teaching students with different backgrounds, but we made it work, and I think it worked well,” Horton said. “During the first few weeks, I met with the engineering students and gave them a mini-course on molecular biology, and Chris met with the biologists for an introduction to computer science, then we joined together for the last half of the term. We also had some guest speakers come in to talk about applications of bioinformatics in the real world.”
This kind of real-world science will help the students after graduation as they further their education or enter the workforce. Bioinformatics in particular is an expanding field, with job openings across the country.
Other lab modules developed to introduce quantitative methods in biology courses include one that introduces students to the basic concepts of geographic information systems, mathematical modeling and landscape ecology; one exploring aquatic ecology and demonstrating computer modeling of complex systems; a module that demonstrates the mathematics associated with the kinetics of biochemical systems; and one looking at the effects of flow on vascular endothelial cells. The flow module was used in Introduction to Bioengineering during the winter 2007 term and students, particularly engineering students, enjoyed the hands-on aspect of learning techniques used in biology research.
All of the lab modules are available on the bioengineering website (http://bioengineering.union.edu) and can be downloaded by teachers at other institutions for use in their classroom.