The doctoral program landscape across the country is increasingly competitive, with top candidates receiving multi-year high-salary offers, signing bonuses and travel funds from multiple highly ranked programs. The National Excellence Fellows Program (NEFP) was created within the department to help attract these high-achieving students.
Jim Tronolone is a first-year Ph.D. student in Dr. Abhishek Jain’s lab working on organ-on-a-chip devices, specifically researching type 1 diabetes treatment. Tronolone said he is interested in working to vascularize islets (help the formation of new blood vessels), which can be transplanted as a diabetes treatment.
“The motivation is to improve islet survival following implantation. Currently, islet replacement therapy has low success because the islets die before new vasculature transporting oxygen and nutrients can form,” Tronolone said. “My project involves trying to vascularize islets on a chip and analyze their exocrine functions, and we’ll eventually move on to adapting the model so that we can 3D print implantable grafts.”
Tronolone was finishing his master’s at George Washington University when Jain’s name came up in class. Jain had reached out to a colleague looking for prospective Ph.D. students. Tronolone had come across Jain’s name before.
I’ve been doing organ-on-a-chip research since last year. My previous lab was another organ-on-a-chip lab and just from doing work there I stumbled upon his research,” Tronolone said.
The NEFP is designed for students pursuing their Ph.D. in biomedical engineering, specifically those intending to pursue translational research that impacts the biomedical engineering industry.
Jain, assistant professor, said through the NEFP, faculty have additional incentives to actively recruit prospective students who would otherwise be going to the top five schools in the country.
“It encourages faculty members to get engaged with some of these brightest students and advocate their work,” Jain said. “[Jim and I] were constantly in touch and he was very well aware of the work that we do. He was very excited to be a part of our lab and I was very excited to have him.”
Participants receive a $38,000 annual stipend, a $17,000 cost-of-education allowance, an invitation to special networking opportunities with industry and academic partners, and the opportunity to complete internships with industry or national labs, or complete training programs on related careers in academia.
Another goal of the program is for faculty and students to work together to help the student leverage the NEFP to also apply for external fellowships. Tronolone was recently announced as a recipient of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP).
“The National Excellence Fellows Program was developed with the intention to attract top graduate student prospects — those with extensive research experience and outstanding potential as leaders” with a rare opportunity to focus on translational work,” said Dr. Michael McShane, department head and originator of the NEFP concept. “This is a very different emphasis than traditional fellowship programs (NSF, Hertz, etc.) and is more aligned with our departmental goals. Still, we have had students win both NEFP and NSF GRFP awards — they are just so impressively prepared that they are able to bridge the fundamental and applied research.”
The department expects to offer two or three NEFP awards per year.