Program for Montana State doctoral students facilitates interdisciplinary collaboration, professional development

BOZEMAN - Though Gwendolyn Cooper knew she wanted a career in research when she set out to earn a Ph.D. at Montana State University, she worried that the process of acquiring a doctoral degree might force her to narrow her research focus.

"I've had this problem my whole life of being interested in everything," said Cooper, who will graduate with a Ph.D. in biochemistry at the university's fall commencement ceremony on Dec. 12. "Typically, Ph.D. students almost become hyper-focused in one area. I didn't want to do that because I think I would get bored if I only worked on one thing."

Through four and half years of doctoral work, Cooper's fears never came to pass, thanks to the interdisciplinary focus in the lab of her adviser Brian Bothner, professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry in the College of Letters and Science, and a collaborative research program he suggested to her.

Cooper's dissertation was on perturbations in redox chemistry, which is the study of changes in electron transfer between two substances. Those reactions "affect anything from how we respond to toxic environments to how diseases are oftentimes characterized by loss of homeostasis or balance," she said. While conducting redox research related to human health, Cooper one day mentioned to Bothner that she had seen some intriguing papers on arsenic in Yellowstone National Park.

"He said, 'Oh, well, lucky for you. Here's this program that just started - you should think about applying.'"

That led Cooper to MSU's Extreme Biofilms National Research Traineeship Program, established in 2021 with funding from the National Science Foundation. NRTs are designed to equip graduate students with the skills and knowledge to pursue a range of careers in the fields of science, technology, engineering or mathematics, or STEM. They receive stipends and tuition support for two years, interdisciplinary coursework, professional development training, and opportunities to apply for paid internships at national laboratories or with industrial partners.

Professor Brent Peyton and assistant research professor Dana Skorupa in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering in the Norm Asbjornson College of Engineering were awarded the NRT in the Thermal Biology Institute and Center for Biofilm Engineering. It provides opportunities for interdisciplinary research on biofilm-forming microorganisms in extreme environments, including those that thrive in Yellowstone National Park's hot springs, in Antarctica's icy environments, and in salty, mineral-rich lakes. To date, the program has supported 24 funded Ph.D. students.

"National Research Training Programs are built around what the NSF calls convergent research, which is an approach that integrates expertise, methods and perspectives from multiple disciplines to collaboratively tackle complex problems," Skorupa explained. "In our program, the primary disciplines we're converging are engineering, biochemistry and microbiology. This means a student like Gwen, who comes from a biochemistry background, gains hands-on experience and exposure to research in both engineering and microbiology, broadening her training and skill set."

That structure provided the perfect outlet for Cooper's inquisitiveness and also appealed to her interest in environmental science. In 2022, she and the six other doctoral students in the program's first group began studying microbes in Yellowstone and recently completed a paper on their research to submit for publication.

"It was really this conglomeration of people with very different backgrounds and levels of expertise, and it definitely challenged us to communicate well with one another and fill in holes," Cooper said. "Some people starting out had zero knowledge of biochemistry, whereas I had never seen a biofilm."

But providing cross-disciplinary research opportunities is far from the program's sole function.

"A strong focus of our NRT program is helping students build soft skills that employers value, such as teamwork, leadership and networking, along with strengthening their ability to communicate their research and expand collaborative opportunities" Skorupa said.

The Extreme Biofilms NRT has offered a suite of professional development workshops for program participants, as well as for graduate students in STEM fields across campus. Each NRT program is expected to sustain successful elements of the program at the home institution.

"We're working very hard to institutionalize our professional development offerings, which is a real need for graduate students at MSU," Peyton said.

In addition, students who attend the professional development workshops are eligible to apply for seed grant awards. To date, the program has issued 15 seed grants totaling $22,500 to Master of Science and Ph.D. students across campus.

For Cooper, who will be the program's second graduate, the ultimate developmental opportunity provided through the NRT was an internship with Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Hamilton.

"I learned so much about human health and disease at the RML that I was able to bring back to some of the projects I worked on here at MSU," she said. Those included work she had done in Bothner's lab, as well as a project with a nutrition research group led by Mary Miles, professor in the Department of Food Systems, Nutrition and Kinesiology in the College of Education, Health and Human Development.

"It was this great accidental collaboration that happened, and I think that's the whole goal of the internship program that I did with RML - to facilitate that partnership between our federal science institutions and academics," she said.

Cooper hopes to continue at RML as a postdoctoral researcher and perhaps make her career there. She credits the opportunities she's had to the mentoring she received from Bothner and in the NRT.

"Gwen is fabulous, and I would say she's an example of all the top-notch NRT trainees we've had in the program," said Peyton. In fact, five trainees supported by the program have received prestigious NSF Graduate Research or EPSCoR Graduate program fellowships.

Though the Extreme Biofilms NRT is not eligible to be renewed once its five-year term is up, Peyton added that he strongly encourages other MSU faculty to consider applying for training grants to create their own programs.

"They're lots of fun and very, very rewarding," he said.