Speaker
Description
Introduction: The Tissue Engineering Resource Center (TERC) was established to serve the established, junior and aspiring investigators and trainees by providing advanced technologies, training and service; as well as students and the general public by providing dissemination and outreach programs. Our ambition is to offer resources that will be transformative to the overall impact of tissue engineering on science and its translation.
Methodology: We sought to engage bioengineers across career levels and democratize the accessibility of “hands on” tissue engineering tools, and mentorship by offering remotely a portfolio of new resources. As a part of training, we created the Tissue Engineering Career Conversations podcast envisioned to shed light on a wide range of career trajectories, academic and non-academic, that have emerged from the bioengineering community. As a part of dissemination, we host the weekly Tissue Talks seminar series. As a service to the field, we held the Next Generation Tissue Engineering Symposium with the current and emerging leaders providing perspectives on progress in our field. As a part of outreach, we created the Science Simplified series, exploring cutting edge scientific publications in the tissue engineering field in a way suitable for future bioengineers among K-12 students.
Results: Through our website nextgenterc.com and social media platforms, we are interacting with a broad international community in our field, and creating resources that are accessible remotely from anywhere in the world, free of charge. As a result, the Next Generation Tissue Engineering Symposium gathered participants from all continents (Fig 1).
Conclusion: The goal of the TERC is to promote tissue engineering and establish a community for continued exchange of ideas and collaborations among emerging bioengineers. To this end, our group is continuously developing new approaches for training, dissemination and outreach. TERC is providing a highly effective and unique environment, a two way street for our trainees to lead the dissemination and outreach activities, and to learn and practice their utilization.
Acknowledgements We gratefully acknowledge NIH funding support of P41EB027062.
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