Will Train Life Sciences Workers in Massachusetts
04/16/2024
By Katharine Webster
The new Center for Pathogen Research and Training supports research collaborations among faculty across the UMass Lowell campus who study microbes and infectious diseases—and it will soon train life sciences workers, says Chemistry Prof. Mingdi Yan, the center’s director.
“There’s a shortage in the workforce in the Massachusetts life sciences, biotech and pharmaceutical industries,” says Yan. “There is really a need to train students and workers.”
The center recently won a $734,000 grant from the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center to buy equipment for a state-of-the-art laboratory, opening in the fall, that will support both teaching and research. Center faculty are offering a five-course graduate certificate in diagnostics and management skills, and they hope to incorporate the certificate into the undergraduate curriculum. The laboratory can also be used for focused, short-term classes for companies that need to train workers in a new diagnostic technique.
With dangerous infectious diseases on the rise around the world, such a center had been under discussion for several years among faculty in the sciences, health sciences and engineering. But COVID-19 showed how urgent the need was, says Yan, who researches alternative treatments for multidrug-resistant pathogens.
“COVID was the catalyst,” she says. “If we have another pandemic and there’s a need to train the workforce in a short time, we will have that capacity.” Yan says the center is also working to foster research collaborations among faculty—21 researchers across eight departments in the three colleges—with diverse areas of expertise, from epidemiology to biomedical engineering.
“There are more and more issues that cannot be solved by a single investigator or a single discipline,” she says.
For example, Biology Assoc. Prof. Frederic Chain, an associate director of the center, uses bioinformatics to analyze genomes. He and Environmental Engineering Assoc. Prof. Sheree Pagsuyoin were already collaborating when the COVID-19 pandemic struck, and they quickly put together a team of UML researchers to analyze sewage and wastewater for markers of the virus, to predict community outbreaks. That work led to a $660,000 international research award, in collaboration with Northeastern University faculty, to develop wireless sensors that can detect the virus in both wastewater and the air.
Recently, the same UML group, with the addition of Biology Asst. Prof. Sarah Gignoux-Wolfsohn, plus an environmental monitoring firm and faculty from Northeastern and another university, was awarded a $1 million National Science Foundation grant to develop similar sensor technology that can detect pathogens affecting fish and shellfish farmed in seawater. The new lab will help with the training and commercialization aspects of that research, Chain says.
“The Center for Pathogen Research and Training gives us an opportunity to come together as a larger team,” Chain says. “I see it as a launching board for bigger, greater things.”
The impetus for the training program and laboratory grant came from Gregory Chiklis ’92, CEO and chief scientific officer of MSN Diagnostics, says Yan. Chiklis, who serves on the center’s external advisory board, says many diagnostics and life sciences lab managers are aging out of the workforce, and companies are seeking younger workers with science degrees who also have some management skills.
“The certificate will give them some practical skills that you don’t normally get in college,” Chiklis says. “It will give them that upward mobility—and help industry at the same time.”