Twenty years ago, there was no such field as bioinformatics. No neuroengineering. 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, however, these are among the hottest new fields of inquiry, fertile treasure 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.
The hunt for such new discoveries is not an easy one and requires the work of a wholly new kind of scientist, one who is trained to work and communicate across the boundaries of divergent disciplines.
“The old image of the scientist who labors away for years alone in the laboratory until he yells ‘Eureka! I’ve found it!’ doesn’t exist anymore,” says 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.” For these hybrid scientists, the traditional barriers that separate, for example, a neuroscientist from an electrical engineer, or a computer scientist from a molecular biologist, simply don’t exist.
At UCLA, this new cadre is nurtured by graduate programs established with $8 million in funding from the National Science Foundation to build the future intellectual capital of the United States. 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,” says Paul (Wyn) Jennings, program director for traineeships in the NSF’s Division of Graduate Education.
Similar NSF training programs have been set up at 56 U.S. universities, but UCLA is one of only five schools to receive five-year grants for three Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) programs — in neuroengineering, bioinformatics and materials creation.
The university has received this high level of funding, Jennings says, because it has demonstrated that its researchers can work and teach across traditional disciplinary lines. “Many institutions have cross-department research, but only a few such as UCLA have the ability and flexibility to educate across traditional boundaries,” he says. “That is what makes UCLA great in this program, along with their excellent scientists and engineers.”
UCLA is not stopping with the programs it has already established, and recently the university submitted applications for two more IGERT grants, one of them for a program in the social sciences, says Vice Chancellor for Research Roberto Peccei.
“We are not going to be shy about it,” he says. “Because they fit so well with our institutional profile, we are likely to go after more in the future, and we hope that the NSF will keep this program alive.”
The fit is so natural, Peccei says, that if the NSF had not come up with the IGERT concept, UCLA might have invented it itself. In addition, the grants provide necessary support for graduate students who might otherwise have a difficult time finding support because their work crosses disciplinary boundaries.
“By having the program this way, it makes the schools want to cooperate with each other because the federal government is putting money into it,” Peccei says. “It’s a very significant, beneficial push for our cross-disciplinary graduate education.”
To illustrate why these new interdisciplinary sciences have so easily taken root on campus, Professor of Physiological Science and Neurology Allan Tobin simply steps outside his office in the Gonda (Goldschmied) Center for Neuroscience and Genetic Research. A short stroll away is another complex of labs, offices and classrooms for the Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science, Tobin’s partner in the NeuroEngineering Training Program, which was the first IGERT established at UCLA, in 1999. Connected to that complex is the Math Sciences Building. In fact, within a five-minute walk to the Court of Sciences are located the labs of molecular biologists, physicists, chemists, biochemists, computer scientists and health-science researchers, among many others. A culture of collaboration has evolved within this dense concentration of scientists, a culture in which researchers from the Geffen School of Medicine work alongside colleagues from the College of Letters and Science, the engineering and dental schools.
“UCLA is a uniquely interactive place where the boundaries between departments and between schools are remarkably porous,” says Tobin, director of the Brain Research Institute and holder of the Eleanor I. Leslie Chair of Neuroscience. “That’s really the strength of this campus.”
That culture makes all the difference to bright graduate students who want both the freedom to move between disciplines and a structured program and the support of senior faculty from different fields.
“It’s highly unusual to find these dual programs,” says graduate student Jenna Rickus, who came to UCLA with a double major in engineering and biochemistry from Purdue University. Dubbed a “rock star” by her colleagues in neuroengineering, Rickus turned down an offer from MIT when she found the “perfect program” at UCLA, one that blends biology with engineering.
“For most biologists, engineering is a completely foreign world. It can really be tough going back and forth between these worlds,” she says. “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 M.S. ’72, Ph.D. ’74 from materials science in engineering — Rickus and her work to develop sensors that can monitor the activities of signaling molecules in rat brains is part of the bridge that links their labs. Once developed, Rickus’ tiny sensors could give scientists a clearer picture of the circuitry of the brain and the changes that occur due to Parkinson’s disease, for example. “These sensors may one day be used to evaluate a drug treatment — or any other treatment — by correlating changes in the neurotransmitter patterns with a patient’s behaviors,” she explains.
Other graduate students in neuroengineering are focusing on such questions as how the retina processes motion information. Pedro Irazoqui-Pastor, with a master’s in electrical engineering from the University of New Hampshire, is designing a chip that can be implanted in an animal brain to record electrical activity and then transmit that data to a computer “so 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 students like Rickus and Irazoqui-Pastor to straddle both worlds.
“This program made it possible for me to explore these unknown areas without just floundering in the wind,” Rickus says. “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 says.
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 seek and understand new approaches to problems. A large part of that is learning the language of the various disciplines.
For example, to an engineer the word “vector” is a mathematical term that refers to a quantity that has direction as well as magnitude. But to a biological scientist, a vector is something that transmits an infection or carries a piece of DNA. While a neuroscientist is talking about a virus, an engineer would be thinking about a mathematical abstraction.
Understanding the difference “makes you think a little deeper about what you’re talking about,” Tobin says. “Anytime you have people using slightly different vocabularies, concerned about slightly different issues, you have the possibility for creative tension. And that works well.”
In the Materials Creation Training Program, launched last year under Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry Fred Wudl ’64, Ph.D. ’67, the holder of the Courtalds Chair in Chemistry, 15 graduate students have the support of 21 faculty members from six different fields, ranging from chemistry to 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 new materials for the next 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 Robin Garrell, teams of students from mixed scientific backgrounds work on problems that require them to collaborate, despite their different skill sets and vocabularies. In one exercise, a team works on an experiment before passing it on to the next team, eventually rotating the experiment among all the teams. The students then must give feedback on the experiment to the original team. In another exercise, students propose a project and then recruit others from diverse scientific backgrounds to help them to complete it.
“For those of us who have been working in interdisciplinary research for awhile, we’ve learned these skills of collaboration over time,” Garrell says. “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 says, one that involves placing students in commercial and academic labs such as the Los Alamos National Laboratory for up to six months to expose them directly to the practical applications of research.
Graduate student Hieu Duong C.Phil. ’01, a synthetic organic chemist, spent last summer in an industrial laboratory working on a project 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,” says 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,” explains 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. This blend includes 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, says 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 individualized 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. By manipulating the data, one student, Todd Mockler Ph.D. ’02, found a whole family of proteins that are predicted to respond to the changes in light.
“How can this be applied? You could use this information to control the flowering of plants or their growth process,” Fox suggests.
Mockler, a biologist with three years’ experience in the biotech field, entered the IGERT program in his fourth year of graduate work. He now works at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., where he occupies an unusual research niche: He is a plant biologist who can use bioinformatics to make predictions about plants, then turn around to do the biological experiments to test his theories.
“UCLA gave me the opportunity to work at the interface of biology and bioinformatics. I was right in the middle of it, able to operate in both fields,” Mockler says.
Another bioinformatics student, Jason Aten, is using $200,000 in IGERT funds to construct a low-cost, super-computing system by stringing together clusters of PCs. With the power of cluster computing, says Aten, who trained as a computer scientist and a molecular biologist, bioinformaticians will be able to simulate complex models to solve problems — an advance that will greatly accelerate the research programs of those involved in the field.
HAVING LINKS to so many faculty from different areas and the ability to chart their own research course leaves students like neuroengineer Irazoqui-Pastor pinching themselves. “Here I am, a 22-year-old graduate student, and I get to come up with my own research project, creating something from zero. It’s amazing,” he says.
“No matter what you come up with, there’s bound to be some expert on this campus working in that field. So you can have collaboration. It’s a lot of responsibility, and it’s really tough,” Irazoqui-Pastor says. “But we have the chance here to do the kind of research that many graduate students don’t ever have an opportunity to do.”
