A Plaza in Leuven, Belgium.
Visiting Cologne, Germany.
Science in the SuMMERTIME INBT/IMEC program sends students to Belgium for research internships
By Mary SpIro pHoToS By MIkE kEUNG
A
select group of students from Johns Hopkins University will spend 10 weeks during the summer of 2010 in Leuven, Belgium conducting research at The Inter-University MicroElectronics Centre (IMEC). Faculty affiliated with Johns Hopkins Institute for NanoBioTechnology (INBT) worked cooperatively with researchers at IMEC to choose students to participate in projects of mutual interest to both institutions. INBT will fund four students this summer through an IRES (International Research Experience for Students) grant received from the National Science
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Foundation. Students work at IMEC’s world-class microfabrication facility and learn to design, fabricate and test a wide range of biomedical devices. This is the second year that INBT has offered the IRES program at IMEC. During the summer of 2009, INBT sent Mike Keung to work at IMEC. Keung recently completed a bachelor’s degree in chemical and biomolecular engineering with a minor in entrepreneurship and management and is now working toward a master’s degree. While an undergraduate student, Keung assisted in the laboratory of associate professor David Gracias in the
department of chemical and biomolecular engineering and accumulated nearly two years of experience working in micro- and nanofabrication. He also had participated in previous summer corporate internships, most notably at Exxon-Mobil. When Keung left for Belgium in May 2009, he had fairly narrow expectations for what he wanted to achieve. “I hoped to learn new fabrication techniques and ways of perfecting the current ones I was already familiar with. By bringing these back to the Gracias lab, I hoped to improve our own fabrication methods as well as learn more about
