<![CDATA[Record Attendance at Buzz on Biotechnology High School Open House]]> 27195 Georgia Tech's largest graduate student organization, Bioengineering and Bioscience Unified Graduate Students (BBUGS), with the support of the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience (IBB), hosted its annual Buzz on Biotechnology High School Open House.

Open to all Atlanta area high school students, parents and teachers, this year's event drew a record 400+ attendees from 56 different schools. Visitors came to engage in a wide variety of hands-on, innovative science and engineering demonstrations such as "Edible Cells," "Virtual Stomach Surgery," "Acids and Bases," "Electromyography Recordings of Muscles," "Protein Folding." They were able to tour the state-of-the-art laboratories of IBB such as neuroengineering, robotics, atomic force microscopy and biomedical engineering labs. Many guests also attended bioengineering and stem cell seminars and even had the opportunity to take Georgia Tech campus tours and talk with an admissions representative.

The day wrapped up with the always-popular "Egg Drop" contest to find the safest, and lightest, "egg helmet" by dropping all those constructed throughout the day from the atrium's third floor.

The open house event was created in 2003 by BBUGS to reach out to area high school students to indulge their curiosity by introducing them to the world of science and engineering in a fun and accessible way.

]]> Colly Mitchell 1 1285200000 2010-09-23 00:00:00 1479840852 2016-11-22 18:54:12 0 0 news Record Attendance at Buzz on Biotechnology High School Open House Event held at IBB

]]> 2010-09-20T00:00:00-04:00 2010-09-20T00:00:00-04:00 2010-09-20 00:00:00 Colly Mitchell
Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience
Contact Colly Mitchell
404-894-5982

]]> 61170 61170 image <![CDATA[Prosthetic Pete demonstration teaches students abo]]> image/jpeg 1449176308 2015-12-03 20:58:28 1475894533 2016-10-08 02:42:13 <![CDATA[Building Lab Skills]]> 28153 Baseball has spring training and football has its rookie camps and summer workouts. For young researchers at the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience, there is the Techniques Symposium.

The annual two-day scientific training event is always filled with seminars and hands-on workshops on laboratory techniques, software and analysis, as well as scientific communication – skills that are just as important to a scientist as arm strength and foot speed are to an athlete.

“Our goal is to educate student attendees in a really efficient way, to introduce them to all of these different techniques,” says Kathleen Bates, who co-chaired this year’s symposium (June 1-2) with fellow fourth-year grad student, Joshua Hooks.

Bates and Hooks are co-leaders for the Research Committee in BBUGS (Bioengineering and Bioscience Unified Graduate Students), the group that organizes the Techniques Symposium each year.

“We try to design the symposium as a way to provide a good start for student researchers,” Bates says. “And it’s a good place for them to connect with the experts.”

Those experts include faculty and lab staff from the Georgia Institute of Technology, as well as technical whizzes from the corporate world (people who have a wealth of experience using the equipment they represent), all of which conduct an array of training sessions across two busy days.

This year’s event included representatives from the following sponsor companies: Airgas, BD Biosciences, Beckman-Coulter, Bruker, Essen Bioscience, Li-Cor, and Renishaw.

The training sessions were held in core facilities and other labs located in the Petit Biotechnology Building and the Engineered Biosystems Building (EBB) and covered a wide range of techniques and disciplines, including flow cytometry, histotechnology, biomechanics, microscopy, biopolymer characterization, and an MRI demonstration.

Meanwhile, the Suddath Room (Petit Biotechnology building) and the CHOA Seminar Room (EBB) was the place to be for seminars on topics that included (among other things) an introduction to data analysis and visualization as well as image processing and machine learning with MATLAB, live cell imaging, optical microscopy, using Abobe Illustrator for infographics or academic presentations, and a session entitled, “It Takes a Genome – and a little Passion,” conducted by Petit Institute researcher Greg Gibson.

All in all, two days filled end-to-end with useful skills training and knowledge sharing. Most of the attendees were grad students and postdocs, but a number of undergrads also participated. 

“I think this is a particularly effective for early stage grad students and undergrads, simply because they benefit the most from this kind of shotgun approach,” says Hooks. “Really, it’s for any student, because they’re learning skills that they’ll actually be using as they go forward.”

 

CONTACT:

Jerry Grillo
Communications Officer II
Parker H. Petit Institute for
Bioengineering and Bioscience

 

 

 

]]> Jerry Grillo 1 1465390970 2016-06-08 13:02:50 1475896913 2016-10-08 03:21:53 0 0 news Techniques Symposium offers wide-ranging ‘shotgun approach’ for young researchers

]]> 2016-06-08T00:00:00-04:00 2016-06-08T00:00:00-04:00 2016-06-08 00:00:00 Jerry Grillo
Communications Officer II
Parker H. Petit Institute for
Bioengineering and Bioscience

]]> 543051 543031 543051 image <![CDATA[John Robbins]]> 1465696800 2016-06-12 02:00:00 1475895333 2016-10-08 02:55:33 543031 image <![CDATA[Aaron Lifland explains]]> 1465696800 2016-06-12 02:00:00 1475895333 2016-10-08 02:55:33 <![CDATA[Georgia Tech Bio-Graduate Student Group Launches New Website]]> 27349 The Bioengineering and Bioscience Unified Graduate Students (BBUGS) have launched a new website. The new BBUGS website offers features that will enhance the communication and interactions among the students and the bio-community. BBUGS members can now create profiles that will be viewable to the public which allow students to share their current research and accomplishments with other academic and industry organizations within the bioengineering and bioscience fields.

Additionally, the new BBUGS website has incorporated a message board whereby BBUGS members can post announcements pertaining to job openings, scholarship/grant availabilities, seminars/workshops or upcoming social activities. The new website design includes new and improved functionality to make navigation throughout the website less complicated and more manageable.

BBUGS is currently the largest, most diverse, graduate student group on the Georgia Tech campus and is an interdisciplinary student group, comprised of 8 different departments, with their home in the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience. Comprised of over 500 members, BBUGS serves as the core student group for the bioengineering and bioscience community and is open to all Georgia Tech and Emory University students from bio-related fields.  Existing members are encouraged to go to the new website and create a profile to stay engaged. 

]]> Floyd Wood 1 1327662017 2012-01-27 11:00:17 1475896262 2016-10-08 03:11:02 0 0 news 2012-01-27T00:00:00-05:00 2012-01-27T00:00:00-05:00 2012-01-27 00:00:00 Floyd Wood

]]> 68922 68922 image <![CDATA[Bioengineering & Bioscience Unified Graduate Students (BBUGS)]]> image/png 1449177214 2015-12-03 21:13:34 1475894599 2016-10-08 02:43:19 <![CDATA[http://www.bbugs.gatech.edu/]]> <![CDATA[BBUGS NEWS ITEM TEST]]> 27326 This is the body

]]> Tanner Dorheim 1 1282663032 2010-08-24 15:17:12 1475896039 2016-10-08 03:07:19 0 0 news TEST

]]> 2010-08-24T00:00:00-04:00 2010-08-24T00:00:00-04:00 2010-08-24 00:00:00 <![CDATA[Students Making Connections]]> 28153 Let’s say you’re a graduate student working toward a Ph.D. in bioengineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. You’ve got a solid background in the sciences. You’re studying at one of the world’s top ranked engineering institutions. And you’ve spent more late nights than you can remember working in a lab, maybe at the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience, where you spend many hours focusing on the large impact of little things, like cells and molecules.

So, what waits on the other side of your thesis, besides a potential stint as a postdoc? What will your career look like? A new Bioengineering and Bioscience Unified Graduate Students (BBUGS) mentorship program is trying to help Georgia Tech students bring that picture into clearer focus.

“We started talking about internships and how graduate students get career advice, and we came to the conclusion that while there is this great community around the Petit Institute and BBUGS, it was kind of hard for us to access a lot of information and networking,” says Tom Bongiorno, who co-chairs the Education and Outreach committee for BBUGS. “So we came up with this mentorship program. It seems like a great way for both the student and the mentor to connect.”

Grad students are paired with mentors from academia, industry, or government – professionals who have a good handle on the different career paths available because, even for very smart people, the career element of the bio-equation can be tricky business.

“For example, I see a lot of people graduating with Ph.D.s from Georgia Tech who say they’re interested in going into industry without really understanding the different opportunities,” says Cynthia Sundell, director of life sciences industry collaborations for the Petit Institute. She’s serving as one of the first 25 mentors in the new BBUGS program. “That is something I can bring to a student, the perspective of someone who has worked 20 years in industry and knows how it’s organized and the different career paths.”

Sundell helped connect the BBUGS program to different industry partners, and the students also tapped into the Petit Institute’s Executive Advisory Board, several of whom have signed on to serve as mentors. The students, led by Bongiorno and Claire Segar (co-chair of BBUGS), sent out a request to potential mentors. Half of them agreed to help, and their professional background information was made available online to students.

“We set a time for signups online, and gave people time to review the list of mentors to see who was a good fit for them. Half of the mentors were gone within a minute,” says Segar, who is interested in an academic career and chose Arizona State professor Sarah Stabenfeldt as her mentor. “The great things about these mentors is they’ve had a lot of different experiences so they’ve transitioned between academia to industry, or the other way around. They can not only speak to what led them to where they are today in their careers, but for students who aren’t sure, they can help define their options.”

That’s exactly what Bongiorno is looking for with his mentor, Russ Bell, a member of the Executive Advisory Board and a Georgia Tech graduate who is retired after a long career in industry, during which he spearheaded the development of many diagnostic products in cancer and cardiovascular disease (among other things). “Getting that one-on-one mentorship from someone like Dr. Bell can really help you hone in on a specific career goal,” Bongiorno says. “Starting out you’re like, ‘oh yeah, industry sounds great.’ Narrowing that down is something else.”

Sundell totally agrees. She hears it all the time. “So many people who want to get into the pharmaceutical industry are thinking, ‘research.’ That’s too narrow. They can broaden their concept of what to think of as a job in industry,” she says. “Research and discovery is a small part of what pharma does.”

A mentor like Sundell can also speak to other challenges facing Ph.D.s thinking about a broader life picture.

“To women, I can speak to the life-work balance and the issues I’ve confronted in my career. I can share those real-life experiences with them, offer some perspective of what they can anticipate when they get to the job market, but also want to be married and have a family,” says Sundell, who has a PhD.

The mentorship program lasts a year and mentors meet with their students (mentees) about once a month, which Sundell says, “gives a student and mentor time to build a relationship. Which means she’s got time to open up to me, and I’ve got time to understand what gets her jazzed, so I can help guide her toward the proper career path.”

 

CONTACT

Jerry Grillo
Communications Officer II
Parker H. Petit Institute for
Bioengineering and Bioscience

 

]]> Jerry Grillo 1 1424081427 2015-02-16 10:10:27 1475895762 2016-10-08 03:02:42 0 0 news New Mentorship Program emphasizes career guidance

]]> 2015-02-16T00:00:00-05:00 2015-02-16T00:00:00-05:00 2015-02-16 00:00:00 Jerry Grillo
Communications Officer II
Parker H. Petit Institute for
Bioengineering and Bioscience

]]> 377651 377651 image <![CDATA[Bongiorno and Segar]]> image/jpeg 1449246205 2015-12-04 16:23:25 1475894342 2016-10-08 02:39:02