Who is eligible to participate in the NRT program?
The EmIRGE-Bio NRT program supports fellows, associates, and additional graduate students in Syracuse.
Fellows must be U.S. Citizens and in a degree program at Syracuse University, and are supported with a one-year research assistantship in their second year of academic study. Fellowships are awarded to incoming admitted students as well as current first-year graduate students in our primary and secondary SU departments. If you have questions about how to apply for fellowship, contact a member of our leadership committee.
Other graduate students at Syracuse University, SUNY Upstate Medical University, and SUNY ESF are welcome to participate as associates. Associates should be in one of the primary or second departments at one of these institutions, and elect to take courses, participate in curricular and co-curricular program activities, and/or engage in NRT-related research projects. Students who participate at the associate level are eligible for NRT seed funding grants.
Graduate students across SU, SUNY UMU, and SUNY ESF are welcome to participate in various aspects of NRT programming, including our professional development activities. Please visit our website for upcoming events or to inquire about opportunities.
How do students apply to the NRT program?
Interested students should apply directly to graduate programs in one of our primary or secondary departments, and click the checkbox on the application expressing interest in the EmIRGE-Bio NRT. For links to these individual departmental applications, as well as contacts who can answer questions in each department, please visit this page: https://bioinspired.syr.edu/emirge-bio/apply/prospective-students/ .
We also encourage applicants to include a discussion of how your interests align with the NRT in your application materials. You can also list faculty in the NRT who you might be interested in working with.
What is the structure of the NRT program?
NRT Fellows and Associates are admitted to Ph.D. programs directly to their individual departments. In the first year, students will take tailored discipline-specific courses in their chosen core discipline within their admission department, to develop a core base knowledge. In the second year, students will participate in a Fall cohort-building skills development course focused on ethics and science communication. In the spring of their second year, they will participate in a cornerstone “Emergent Intelligence in Biological and Bio-Inspired Systems” course focused on how local interactions drive emergent dynamical behavior in four specific biological/bioinspired materials contexts. The curriculum also includes a STEM entrepreneurship course in the highly-ranked Whitman School of Management, as well as co-curricular activities in the BioInspired Professional Development Program (PDP) to facilitate students gaining the competencies expected in these careers, such as project management and information science literacy.
Fellows and Associates will have the opportunity to participate in and eventually lead interdisciplinary research projects to identify and characterize emergent behaviors – responses of composite systems that are not expected from studying one sub-unit but instead require a characterization of interactions between multiple units – and to harness such behaviors to drive intelligent responses that require sensing, actuating, and learning. These projects span fields and topics, from living systems to engineering to the physical sciences. Depending on the department, students may begin to engage in research when they first arrive, or they may work to identify a research advisor in their first year and then engage in research after that. Each year, the NRT faculty develop booklet of “brochures” advertising initial ideas for collaborative research projects to help NRT trainees identify teams to work on. In general, NRT trainees will have a primary advisor in their home department, as well as one or two secondary advisors in other departments related to their interdisciplinary research projects. We also expect that pairs of NRT trainees from different departments may work together on different aspects of the same project.
What type of degree will NRT students receive?
Students will graduate with a Ph.D. from their primary department. They are also eligible receive microcredentials (badges) for skills developed in the professional development program.