Among recent developments, the college’s biomanufacturing program received $1.6 million in grant funding from the National Science Foundation, geared largely toward generating interest in biomanufacturing-related fields among women and non-white students currently underrepresented in STEM disciplines, according to Dominique Ingato, chair of the college’s biotechnology department. Since piloting the college’s biomanufacturing program in 2017, Ingato said the now-permanent program has garnered over $10 million in funding from organizations like the NSF and other industry partners to support its research and education efforts. She added that the college’s Bioscience Workforce Development Hub, an initiative where students can earn credentials through work-based training in biotechnology, has played an integral role in establishing new career training opportunities for low-income and underrepresented students who are often otherwise timid about pursuing technical STEM fields like biotech.
“We started [the program] out as a pilot, as one of the first bachelor’s degree programs at a California community college, and since then, it’s been approved to be a permanent program,” she said of recent developments. “We’re hoping to continue to expand and grow the program, seeing that there’s such a need from the local [biotech] industry.”
Ingato said MiraCosta’s biomanufacturing program and workforce hub have placed recent emphasis on industry partnerships in order to provide more hands-on learning opportunities for students interested in biotech. She added that such partnerships will play a key role in plans to increase program enrollment and participation among women, nonwhite students and low-income students.
“We’ve been partnering with many different companies and expanding these partnerships as more companies move into our area. … We’ve partnered with a local incubator, Open Biopharma, in order to put students into research roles during the summer or during the semester, where they can get that hands-on experience and build up their skills before entering the workforce. That’s been a major focus,” she said. “And we’ve had a number of students go through those programs already.”
In order to accommodate continued growth in the college’s biotech education and research programming, Ingato said the college is constructing a new building on campus with more space for state-of-the-art chemistry and biochemistry labs and two 40-seat classrooms. She said the $46.9 million project is expected to be completed this summer or fall.
“Instead of having 30 students enter per cohort per year, hopefully we’ll be able to have 60 once we have that new facility up and running,” she said. “We’ll have more dedicated classroom space specifically for our program, and it’ll be a great way to highlight what we’re doing on campus.”
In addition to those plans, Ingato said the college is ramping up efforts to beef up its biotech course catalog and programming such as internships, which aim to provide more opportunities for students to familiarize themselves with the latest biomanufacturing technologies, such as next-gen sequencers in health care, among other emerging tools.
“We are developing a short course on flow cytometry, and we’ve started to use these flow cytometers in our existing coursework. We are also developing a short course that will be entirely focused on the flow cytometer so that if someone from the industry needs to come back in and gain that specific skill of working with a flow cytometer, we’ll be able to provide that to them, as well as to our current students,” she said. “We recently obtained a next-gen sequencer and are working on getting that set up and planning to create a short course on next-generation sequencing.”
