The National Science Foundation has awarded a grant of just over $1 million to Missouri Western and Davidson College in North Carolina for undergraduate synthetic biology research. The grant is the largest research grant in University history.
Missouri Western is the lead institution for the grant proposal, which was written by Missouri Western professors Dr. Todd Eckdahl, professor of biology; Dr. Jeff Poet, professor of mathematics; and their Davidson College colleagues Dr. A. Malcolm Campbell and Dr. Laurie Heyer.
The collaborative grant will support research on the development of a system to program bacteria to control bacteria’s metabolism. The system has applications in energy, the environment, pharmaceuticals, food production and more, said Dr. Eckdahl.
The three-year grant will provide 18 undergraduate students on each campus with full-time summer research jobs and summer support for the faculty researchers. It will also pay for research supplies and equipment, face-to-face research meetings on each campus and travel to professional conferences.
“The grant application succeeded because we have a track record of collaborating across disciplines and across institutions to provide valuable educational experiences for students while they conduct cutting-edge synthetic biology research,” Dr. Eckdahl said.
Since the synthetic biology team was formed in 2006, they have published 10 papers in professional journals, and 79 undergraduate students from Missouri Western and Davidson were listed as co-authors. Two papers published in the Journal of Biological Engineering are the two most accessed papers in the journal’s history.
“These students get the experience of not only answering questions that have not been addressed before, they get to ask questions that have never been asked,” Dr. Poet said. “And they work alongside us to devise approaches to address those questions.”
Josh Chester, a mathematics student who was involved in the synthetic biology research last summer, said he learned a lot about how research was done and had a lot of fun. “But more importantly,” he said, “this summer research convinced me that this is what I want to do for the rest of my life. In the future, I want to be in my professor’s shoes and extend the opportunity to future generations.”
This is the fourth NSF grant the project has received, but local funding from Missouri Western and from the Missouri Western Foundation was very important in starting the synthetic biology research program, Dr. Eckdahl said.