After 10-weeks of intensive research immersion this summer, five student interns in INBT’s International Research Experience for Students (IRES) program are heading home to Hopkins. Since 2009, the IRES program, supported by the National Science Foundation, has provided Hopkins students the chance to perform research at imec in Leuven, Belgium. Imec is a research institute specializing in microelectronics and have world-class laboratories and microfabrication facilities. The program’s goal is to cultivate the interns’ perceptions of global challenges in STEM, learn how to collaborate with international partners, develop their research skills, and build a global network of colleagues.

The 2019 IRES interns spent their time with the Life Science Technologies section of imec and performed an array of research, which included developing an in vitro cardiotoxicity assay, developing techniques to deliver biological samples to a chip, finding suitable polymers for 3-D printing microfluidics, optimizing DNA extraction on microchips, and electrical partial cell lysis. As part of the IRES program, students produce bi-weekly blogs. The students use the blogs to show the progress of their research, and reflect on their professional goals and observations on how research is conducted in another country. You can read 2019 summer intern blogs, as well as all previous student blogs, on the IRES blog website.

(Above photo: Summer 2019 IRES student interns. From left: Sharada Narayanan, Thomas DiSorbo, Hannah Christina Aspinwall, Kirby Leo, and Elmer Zapata-Mercado.)