Diversity in Biotechnology Get a Boost at Virginia State
Biotechnology is one of the rapid-growing sectors in science, but it aches minus diversity in its work strength, as do many other scientific fields. Recent studies propose that African-Americans and Hispanics lag behind whites for higher-paying biotech jobs by the biggest margins in nearly a decade.
Researchers at Virginia State University, an institution designated by the United States Department of Education as one of the Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU), are addressing this disbalance by utilizing grid technology as a resource to teach students and educators about bioinformatics.
Glenn Harris, an assistant professor in the Department of Biology at VSU, utilized grant funding from the United States Department of Agriculture and the National Institutes of Health to obtain a 12-node cluster server and the iNquiry bioinformatics software suite developed by The BioTeam, Inc. The software uses SunGridEngine technology to schedule computational work and distribute them among the different nodes, thus enabling numerous students from a class or workshop to submit computationally-intensive jobs side by side and attain results promptly.
Instructors already use this technology in higher-level classes at VSU to give critical bioinformatics training. For example, students from Brian Sayre’s Techniques in Molecular Biology course are using the BLAST software (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool) to search for similar sequences of transcribed protein-coding genes from distinct species.
In addition, Harris is holding a workshop series for students and educators from neighboring high schools and HBCUs to introduce them with the tools, resources and opportunities available in VSU’s biotechnology program, and in biotechnology in general.
“Demonstrating the resources that are there on the server and how they are utilized to solve real issues can be our best recruitment tool,” said Harris. The grid technology is permitting VSU to be better geared to recruit and train students to reach the ever-evolving demands of biotechnology careers.
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