MIT Biotechnology Process Engineering Center

What it is. From August 2006 to 2008 I was Lab Manager at the MIT Biotechnology Process Engineering Center (the BPEC), in Linda Griffith’s research orbit. The BPEC ran microfluidic-bioreactor work in the same microphysiological-systems lineage that later got associated with the organ-on-a-chip field. The job was operations, safety training, and regulatory compliance for a high-output research center. An operations job in a research building is where you learn what science actually requires of the people who do it.

The paper. I am the “R. Littrell” on Fan, Tamama, Au, Littrell, et al., “Tethered epidermal growth factor provides a survival advantage to mesenchymal stem cells,” Stem Cells 25(5):1241–1251 (2007). It is a biomaterials paper: immobilizing EGF on a surface keeps mesenchymal stem cells spreading and surviving longer than soluble EGF, with implications for tissue-engineering scaffolds. I did bench work on a slice of the project as a junior author. It is the paper that proved to me I could do academic biomedical engineering for real.

The liver bioreactor. Alongside the stem-cell work, the BPEC ran a 3D perfused microfluidic liver bioreactor program. I technically supported the platform on the primary cell culture and bioreactor-assembly side of the workflow.

iGEM. In 2007 I was the graduate advisor to the MIT iGEM team, whose project was a microbial system for mercury bioremediation. Helping undergraduates design experiments and not panic during the build cycle was where I first understood what synthetic biology was going to become, and where I met people I would be in community-bio with for the next fifteen years. Years later, in 2015, that lineage put me in the Chair seat for the iGEM Community Labs Track.