BY CYNTHIA LEE
UCLA Today Staff

Twenty years ago, there was no such field as bioinformatics or neuroengineering. There were no materials to create devices smaller than the diameter of a human hair. If they existed at all, it was only in the minds of visionary scientists.

Today, these are fertile grounds that are being mined for scientific riches — more effective therapies to fight disease, answers to the mysteries surrounding the circuitry of the human brain, retinal implants for the blind, low-energy sources of light.

To make these new discoveries requires a wholly new kind of scientist.

“The old image of the scientist who labors for years alone in the laboratory until he yells ‘Eureka! I’ve found it!’ doesn’t exist anymore,” said Robin Garrell, associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry. “Discoveries are now happening in-between fields, in collaboration with others from different fields and by combining concepts. So it’s important that we now have scientists who can think beyond the boundaries of their own training.”

At UCLA, this new cadre is being nurtured by three graduate programs established with $8 million in funding from the National Science Foundation. These future scientists are being educated “to have a broader perspective while maintaining their depth in at least one traditional field of science or engineering,” said Paul (Wyn) Jennings, program director for traineeships in the NSF’s Division of Graduate Education.

These NSF training programs, called the Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) programs, have been set up at 56 U.S. universities. UCLA is one of only five universities to have three such programs under way — in neuroengineering, bioinformatics and materials creation.

“Many institutions have cross-department research, but only a few such as UCLA have the ability and flexibility to educate across traditional boundaries,” said Jennings. “That is what makes UCLA great in this program, along with their excellent scientists and engineers.”

The fit is so natural, Vice Chancellor for Research Roberto Peccei said, that if the NSF had not come up with the IGERT concept, UCLA might well have invented it itself. “Because they fit so well with our institutional profile, we are likely to go after more [grants] in the future, and we hope that the NSF will keep this program alive,” he said.

To illustrate why these new interdisciplinary sciences have so easily taken root on campus, Professor of Physiological Science and Neurology Allan Tobin stepped outside his office in the Gonda (Goldschmied) Center for Neuroscience and Genetic Research. A short stroll away is the Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science, Tobin’s partner in the Neuro-Engineering Training Program, which was the first IGERT established at UCLA, in 1999. A five-minute walk away is the Court of Sciences, where researchers from the David Geffen School of Medicine work alongside colleagues from the College of Letters and Science and the engineering and dental schools.

“UCLA is a uniquely interactive place where the boundaries between departments and between schools are remarkably porous,” said Tobin, director of the Brain Research Institute and holder of the Eleanor I. Leslie Chair of Neuroscience.

This culture of collaboration is the beacon that brings to the campus bright graduate students who seek a structured program, the support of senior faculty from different fields and the freedom to move between disciplines.

“It’s highly unusual to find these dual programs,” said former graduate student Jenna Rickus. Dubbed a “rock star” by her colleagues, Rickus turned down an offer from MIT when she found the “perfect program” in neuroengineering at UCLA.

“For most biologists, engineering is a completely foreign world. It can really be tough going back and forth between these worlds,” said Rickus, now on the faculty at Purdue University. “You have to understand the differences between the two. There are cultural differences in how the sciences are taught, how scientists talk to each other, even how papers are written.”

But with the support of mentors from both disciplines — Tobin from neuroscience and Bruce Dunn from materials science in engineering — Rickus and her work to develop sensors to monitor the activities of signaling molecules in rat brains comprised part of the bridge that links their labs.

Other graduate students in neuroengineering are focusing on such questions as how the retina processes motion information. Pedro Irazoqui-Pastor is designing a chip that can be implanted in an animal brain to record electrical activity and transmit that data to a computer so, he said, “we can look at how the cells in the brain work without disturbing the animal in its natural environment.”

Without the IGERT programs, it would be far more difficult for graduate students to straddle both worlds.

“This program made it possible for me to explore these unknown areas without floundering in the wind,” Rickus said. “It sets up lines of communication and formalizes them.”
The cross-talk begins in classes, laboratories, at retreats and journal club meetings where graduate students present and critique recently published papers and discuss them with faculty. “That’s when the biologists get the engineers up to speed, and the engineers bring the biologists up to date,” Rickus said.

What goes on is more than casual conversation; it’s something akin to rewiring the brain patterns of scientific minds that have been trained to think in a particular way, opening them up to learn each other’s vocabulary and envision new approaches to problems.

In the Materials Creation Training Program, launched last year under Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry Fred Wudl, who holds the Courtalds Chair in Chemistry, 15 graduate students have the support of 21 faculty members from six different fields, ranging from physics and astronomy to mechanical and aerospace engineering. As future leaders of the revolution in molecular electronics, these students are learning to design, synthesize and fabricate materials for a new generation of electronic, communication and nanoscale devices.

In addition to the science, they are also learning critical communication skills.

In a lab course created and run by Chemistry Professor Garrell, teams of students from mixed scientific backgrounds work on problems that require them to collaborate, despite their different skill sets and vocabularies. “For those of us who have been working in interdisciplinary research for awhile, we’ve learned these skills of collaboration over time,” Garrell explained. “But it’s a relatively new idea to start building these skills early on.”

It also is a completely different approach to graduate science education, Wudl said, one that involves placing students in commercial and academic labs for up to six months to expose them directly to the practical applications of research.

Graduate student Hieu Duong, a synthetic organic chemist, spent last summer in an industrial laboratory working to develop an organic, polymer-based biosensor that could detect harmful bacteria in the air to guard against chemical attack.

“That internship was a great experience,” said the UC Santa Barbara graduate who is working with Wudl and Yang Yang, a faculty member from materials science and engineering. “When you want to be the best, you have to learn from the best. That’s why I’m here.”

Duong’s own research project involves making a conducting polymer that could ultimately become a lighter-weight replacement for copper wire.

“What I do,” explained Duong, “overlaps with materials engineering and physical chemistry. That kind of interaction among scientists can happen naturally, but if I just walked into someone else’s lab and said, ‘Step aside and let me use your instruments for my own purposes,’ it’s unlikely they would allow it. Instead, IGERT brings everybody together to the same table to make that interaction happen.”

Fifteen faculty from 13 different departments and interdepartmental programs have made their labs and expertise available to students in the Center for Bioinformatics. The center spans mathematics, biomathematics, statistics, biostatistics, computer science and molecular biology.

With the explosion of new knowledge that has come from the sequencing of more than 100 genomes, including the human genome, said Professor of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics C. Fred Fox, “we know the blueprint of life for many, many different organisms. But what do we do now with this massive amount of data?”

Bioinformatics holds the key, dealing with the computational management of biological information to allow scientists to analyze this flood of data. Extracting information about genes and the proteins they make could lead to new drug treatments and a more customized practice of medicine.

Faculty are preparing graduate students — mathematicians, computer scientists and biologists — to develop new computational strategies and applications to mine this genetic data. In one project, a biologist is working with students to define the mechanisms by which plants respond to the shortening or lengthening of days.

“You could use this information to control the flowering of plants or their growth process,” Fox suggested.

Having links to faculty from different areas and the ability to chart their own research course is a boon to graduate students.

“It’s a lot of responsibility, and it’s really tough,” said Irazoqui-Pastor. “But we have the chance here to do the kind of research that many graduate students don’t ever have an opportunity to do.”