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V O L . X X I N O. X V oot Yin knows the look. at first Eureka! moment in a fledg- ling scientist's eyes is so tanta- lizing he knows it will push them to achieve the feeling again and again. "I know that type of experience, and the opportunity to really change the course of a person's life as it did for me," says Yin, an assistant profes- sor at MDI Biological Laboratory in Salisbury Cove. "When I see students come into my lab and achieve that moment, it's phenomenal." Yin's moment came during a summer internship at New England BioLabs Inc. What he originally regarded as a chance for summer employment changed the outlook for his future. At the lab he performed molecular biology, taking fragments of genes from one organism and putting them into another. "is was totally foreign to me that you could do this, but to me it was a highly addictive drug, because it really opened up my eyes in terms of what you can do in science, the types of questions you can ask and ultimately try to answer," Yin says. Ultimately, Yin believes science will be the catalyst for change in Maine's economy and workforce training, but says resources must be committed to it with a long-term vision. Several federally funded programs in Maine aim to do just that. INBRE, for the IDeA Network of Biomedical Research Excellence, is funded by the National Institutes of Health. It was created in 2001 to develop research resources and modern labs that in turn will attract both established investi- gators and develop and enhance the research skills of students. IDeA stands for Institutional Development Award. Another is EPSCoR, the Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research, established by the National Science Foundation in 1978 for states like Maine that typically receive small amounts of federal R&D funding. Last year, Maine ranked 45th nationally in R&D investment. Regenerating science Yin says INBRE funding was a key part of the job package that enticed him from his postdoctoral work at Duke University to MDIBL. "It allowed me to have the funds to obtain the neces- sary equipment and hire the necessary people to jumpstart my research pro- gram," he says. "A lot of people I hired were from the state." One of his INBRE students had no research experience. She worked at a humane society in Bangor, but he saw something in her application and work ethic that made him take a chance on her. "She does phenomenal work," he says. "She was and still is a major catalyst for some of the programs I've initiated to run the company I've formed called Novo Biosciences," a regenerative medicine company. INBRE funds both hands-on labs and research fellowships and pays for some infrastructure and equipment, notes Patricia Hand, vice president of administration and principal investi- gator of Maine INBRE, which is run out of MDIBL. INBRE is a collab- orative network of 11 Maine research institutions and colleges and two outreach institutions. "Of the 718 Maine INBRE under- graduate students who had par- ticipated in INBRE since 2001 and graduated, 112, or 16%, were pursuing science- and health-related careers in Maine," Hand says of the students they tracked. "As of 2013 they were practicing physicians, working at research institutions, or were gradu- ate students in biomedical fields at the University of Maine and the University of New England." e $18.4 million grant the program received last fall will allow for another 800 students to be trained over the next five years, she says. About half of it will be shared with the other INBRE insti- tutions in Maine. "Even if [students] don't pursue a science career, they get the idea of the work world, teamwork and communi- cation," says Hand. "ey can become part of an educated workforce and get the critical life skills we need." Students typically start with a one- to two-week short course to learn basic research skills, she says. at is often followed by summer research or academic year fellowships. Yuka Takemon, a College of the Atlantic graduate, parlayed two academic year fellowships into a job as a research assistant at The Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor. Training budding scientists Federal funding boosts Maine's science and technology workforce B y L o r i V a l i g r a F O C U S M AY 1 8 , 2 0 1 5 24 P H O T O / DAV I D C L O U G H P RO F E S S I O N A L D E V E L O P M E N T / WO R K F O R C E T R A I N I N G

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