Get Involved
NOTE for prospective students/researchers: Research and graduate education opportunities in Bioengineering are managed by the relevant departments, labs, and centers listed at the bottom of the About page. For an application or more information, please contact the department in which you're interested.
Join MIT in Creating a Revolutionary Field
We invite you to join MIT in shaping the future through Bioengineering. Combining world-leading engineering with ground-breaking biology enables MIT to create this exciting new field and harness the power of life. Opportunities for individual involvement and philanthropic support exist in each of the target technology areas. If you are interested in learning more about specific projects and how you can support them or about opportunities to participate in the biongineering initiative, please contact:
Deborah J. Cohen
Senior Director of Development and Communications
School of Engineering
Phone: 617.253.2222
Fax: 617.253.8549
deco@mit.edu
Research Collaboration
Opportunities for collaborative research in bioengineering exist throughout the departments, labs, and centers in the School of Engineering. For inquiries, please contact:
Cynthia Bloomquist
Associate Director of Corporate Relations
Office of Corporate Relations
Phone: 617-253-8982
Fax: 617-253-0002
bloomquist@ocr.mit.edu
Philanthropic Support and Other Involvement
To promote rapid progress in bioengineering, the MIT School of Engineering must attract new faculty and graduate students and create research centers that use engineering principles to understand and exploit biological systems.
Priorities to achieve success in this initiative are:
Endowed Graduate Fellowships
In many MIT departments and labs, the transition for entering graduate students is relatively smooth because they have received a firm grounding in the work as undergraduates. In a new field like bioengineering, however, first-year graduate students simply haven't yet accumulated the simultaneous breadth and depth of knowledge needed to transition into cutting-edge research, and thus need the freedom to undertake more than the typical amount of foundational coursework to fuse engineering with biology. The Department of Biological Engineering, which seeks to build its population of PhD students to a steady-state level of 30 per year, has thus made graduate fellowship support its highest priority.
Interdisciplinary Research Center Funds:
- Bio-Instrumentation: Recent years have seen a revolution in the kinds of instrumentation needed to explore the science and technology of biological systems from the gene level to the organism level. The promise of "functional genomics" in which physiological function is related to genome content, will require measurement across this full hierarchy in ways not currently available. We therefore seek funding to equip an unparalleled laboratory that combines optical, electrical, mechanical, and chemical approaches to enable invention of breathtakingly visionary devices such as micron-sized robots that can probe molecular interactions within individual cells.
- Biological Imaging: Imaging is an area in which the prospects for unveiling mysteries like the workings of molecular mechanisms inside the cell, such as attack by viruses or delivery of therapeutic genes, are most challenging. The School of Engineering desires to team up with the Whitehead Institute to support development of one of the world's most sophisticated imaging centers. Funds are thus sought to help purchase state-of-the-art electron, light, and force microscopes as well as computational power for translating multi-dimensional readouts into real-time, quantitative images of molecular operation in cells, tissues, and organs.
- Bio-Materials: This Center will draw on the lessons being learned about the molecules which make up living systems to create heretofore unimagined bio-materials that can function as novel adhesives, fibers, and motors in new applications yet can also be produced through environmentally-benign processes. MIT seeks an endowed chair for the Center's director charged with setting directions in this largely unexplored area of biotechnology, along with funds for establishing state-of-the-art multi-user facilities.
- Computational Biology: Application of engineering modeling and computational methodologies to the complexities now so overwhelmingly evident in biological systems is an urgent need at MIT in order to lay out a road map for the challenge of "bioinformatics." We anticipate that especially exciting long-term foci will include the tasks of modeling the molecular communications networks known to regulate the working of cells and tissues, and of developing an efficient computational framework for physiological simulation from genomic foundations. MIT seeks funds to endow a chair for a Center director, along with seed grant funds to catalyze such initiatives in multi-investigator fashion across campus.
- Proteomics: The promise of the genomic revolution will only be fully realized if we can understand how the information inherent in DNA is actually manifested in physico-chemical operation of the proteins and other macromolecules that are encoded by the genes. Obtaining this quantitative, mechanistic understanding, as well as an ability to exploit it for technological purposes, is the domain of the newly-emerging field known as proteomics. MIT needs to quickly establish a prominent position in this field, requiring a substantial investment in sophisticated equipment such as exotic mass spectrometers that can identify the composition of intracellular proteins to within a single atom precision. We therefore seek funding to set up a state-of-the-art, multi-user laboratory to provide these capabilities for researchers across disciplines, along with recruitment of an intellectual leader in application of proteomics to biotechnology as a new faculty member.
Bioengineering Opportunities Fund for Flexibility to respond to promising new ideas.
