Educating and fostering a diverse, vibrant community of emerging biotechnology leaders is a central tenet of ExFAB, as well as assuring all researchers, regardless of institution or background, are able to leverage ExFAB’s unique facilities to propel new understandings of extreme microbes. ExFAB accomplishes these critical goals by enabling access to and training on cutting-edge biotechnology workflows and tools through a portfolio of educational programs.
The ExFAB Masters Fellowship Program
The ExFAB MS Fellowship program provides masters students from the California State University (“CSU”) system the opportunity to participate in a ten (10) week summer internship at the ExFAB facilities located at UC Santa Barbara and UC Riverside. The internship period will coincide with CSU’s summer quarter. Internships will consist of an in-depth research project associated with ExFAB and a series of educational seminars and events that seek to bolster skills in science communication, research ethics, innovation and entrepreneurship, and other professional skills. Technical foci include:
- Synthetic Biotech automation and Biofoundry operation
- Bioinforamtics and Big BioData
- Anaerobic microbial culturing
- CryEM imaging and data refinement
Interns will be provided with full support during the internship.
The 2025 MS Fellowship Program is open to all CSU masters students in related scientific disciplines through an application process. ExFAB anticipates opening the application process February 1, 2025.
The ExFAB Summer School
The ExFAB Summer School is a one-week, intensive program to provide in-depth technical training to enable researchers to learn how to use and leverage ExFAB’s unique suite of instrumentation for their own research activities. The 2025 Summer School will focus on Automation in Biology and will teach participants the basics of creating automated workflows using Thermo’s Momentum Software as a testbed system. Topics include how to build workflows, and schedules, and how to evaluate whether automation is worthwhile.
The 2025 Summer School is open to all ExFAB Fellows, MS Students, and graduate students through an application-based process (with undergraduate and graduate students from outside ExFAB on a space-availability basis). Full and partial scholarships are available. ExFAB anticipates opening the application process March 1, 2025.
