The first year of a faculty position is tough anywhere. But picture starting at a university that didn’t exist the year before, where the equipment you need to conduct your research is nonexistent, and you get an idea of what bioengineer Michelle Khine experienced in her first year at the University of California, Merced (UCM) in 2006.
She wanted to jump into designing and making her own microfluidics chips, which have become the tiny workhorses of biology labs all over the world, to study how the chemokine interleukin-8 (IL-8) helps immune cells find and destroy pathogens. But UCM lacked the clean rooms and sophisticated fabrication equipment that engineers typically use to make microfluidics chips out of silica. In fact, Khine started her tenure working out of a defunct air force base in the next town over. “It was actually really hard in the beginning,” Merced admits. Then a visit to ...
