Bio boom: Brown master’s programs take off

After earning a master’s degree in biomedical engineering at Brown University, Kali Manning stayed to pursue doctoral studies with her 3D tissue engineering research group. / FRANK MULLIN/BROWN UNIVERSITY
After earning a master’s degree in biomedical engineering at Brown University, Kali Manning stayed to pursue doctoral studies with her 3D tissue engineering research group. / FRANK MULLIN/BROWN UNIVERSITY

PROVIDENCE – With equally strong interests in biology and visual arts, Rebecca Wojciechowicz enjoyed a quintessentially Brown undergraduate experience, parlaying the open curriculum into a dual concentration that she completed in 2014. But then she stayed to earn a master’s degree in biotechnology.

“I’m really into this concept called biomimicry,” Wojciechowicz said in a release. She completed her degree requirements in December and will formally receive her master’s in May. “It makes sense to emulate nature when creating and innovating manmade designs. And it’s a great way to put both of my interests together.”

She realized that as a master’s student, she could gain valuable engineering skills and research experience to better apply her creativity to bio-inspired designs. Through the program, she also found a job designing and developing products at Bard Davol, a medical device company based in Warwick.

The trail Wojciechowicz followed to a master’s in biotechnology had barely been blazed when she enrolled, but along with biomedical engineering, the program is rapidly gaining popularity. In 2012, the two programs enrolled only a dozen students combined; this year they boast 65. In 2012, students from the programs earned 1.7 percent of Brown’s master’s degrees, but that jumped to 4.6 percent last year. That’s a growing share of a growing pie, given that master’s degrees increased from 479 to 520 over the same period university-wide.

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Brown’s biomedical engineering and biotech boom is a product of the university’s investments in programs that have significant pent-up demand from both students and employers, program director Jacquelyn Schell, research assistant professor of molecular pharmacology, physiology and biotechnology, said in a statement.

“We realized there was a market for these degrees,” Schell said in a statement. “Not only are students from all sorts of science backgrounds interested in these fields, but also the skills they learn from these two degrees are transferable once they join the workforce.”

In 2013, CNN Money declared biomedical engineer the best job in the country. The industry is volatile, especially in the stock market, but even amid those fluctuations, New England’s biotech employers were rapidly increasing wages in 2016 to compete for workers.

Realizing these trends were afoot, Brown hired Schell, an alumna, in 2012 to lead a rebirth in the programs. For years, it had been possible to get a master’s degree in these fields from Brown, but few students did. Schell has greatly increased the programs’ visibility, but Brown’s investment has gone well beyond getting out the word.

In the last few years, Beth Zielinski, who directs industry outreach, helped launch six-month paid co-op internships at 11 companies, and Schell and other faculty members have developed many new courses for the programs. They also launched a part-time degree for working students. The next development will debut in the fall: a track in biotechnology management for business-minded students.

Wojciechowicz applied for one of the new co-ops, which is how she got her start at Bard Davol. She earned a salary and course credit by participating in corporate research and new product development. When the co-op was over, the company hired her in December 2015 as a research and development project consultant.

Many paths to master
But Wojciechowicz’s path is not the only option. While she earned her master’s in a fifth year at Brown, two-thirds of the biotech and biomedical engineering master’s students arrive from elsewhere. And while many pursue industry careers, more than half continue in academia after earning degrees.

A courses-only master of arts track in biotechnology is favored by some pre-med students, but most of those who enroll are attracted to the program’s strong research focus, which prepares them for either doctoral programs or industry, Schell said. Of the eight required credits, students can fulfill three by writing a thesis based on working in a faculty member’s lab. On average, students from the two programs have each co-authored one peer-reviewed publication.

“These students become an integral part of the research here at Brown,” Schell said. “They put so much work into these research projects and they accomplish a lot. They are building the research enterprise here.”

Kali Manning, who came to Brown after studying biomedical engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, in Worcester, Mass., is one such example. For her research, Manning joined the lab of Professor Jeffrey Morgan, who develops technologies for tissue engineering, a topic she studied at WPI. In 2014 she co-authored a paper on a prototype device for making large three-dimensional tissues. When Manning completed her master’s in 2015, she continued in the lab as a doctoral student. Now she’s working to figure out how to grow capillaries within engineered tissues. As the tissues become larger, eventually on the scale of whole artificial organs, engineers will need to grow vasculature within them to keep the cells within alive.

Harry Cramer, now in his second semester of the biomedical engineering master’s program, hopes to continue to a Ph.D. As an undergraduate bioengineering major at the University of California at Merced, Calif., he completed a capstone project working with a company on a method to turn agricultural waste into activated carbon for water filtration. In graduate school, he wanted to focus on medical applications.

Now, as Cramer takes classes in advanced scientific imaging, he’s also working in the lab of Christian Franck, an assistant professor of engineering whose studies include the effects of traumatic brain injury at the cellular level. Cramer’s experiments are focused on developing a model of brain tissue mechanics.

“I love the lab, the research, and the people in the lab are great,” Cramer said in a statement.

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