Center for Environmental Biotechnology at UTennessee

Education & Outreach

The Education & Outreach mission of the CEB is to integrate cross-disciplinary training into the very fabric of graduate and postdoctoral careers in BioMicroElectronics and Environmental Biotechnology; thereby, developing versatile professionals that rapidly exploit the fast pace of information and technology development across fields. These professionals will synthesize new insights, approaches and technologies across disciplines to meet the growing interdisciplinary R&D demands of academia and industry. The success of CEB’s training model is validated by NRC and DOE Alexander Hollaender postdoctoral fellowship awards; academic positions at Institutions, such as Cornell University, Purdue University and Syracuse University; and industrial posts at companies, such as Merck, BASF and Monsanto that have been achieved by recent graduates.

The education and training component of the CEBs mission is highly nested in the graduate education of students engaged in funded research, and has benefited greatly over the past 12 years from support from the University of Tennessee’s (UT) Waste Management Research and Education Institute. Forms of support have been the graduate fellowships and supplemental stipends awarded to outstanding doctoral candidates whose research focuses on waste-related themes, assistantships in interdisciplinary science and engineering research, postdoctoral research fellowships and lab-based training experience for undergraduate students. The Research Center for Excellence designation recently awarded by UT to the CEB will allow more of these types of research opportunities to be available for graduate students and new postdoctoral positions.

As part of field studies of contaminant migration and remediation, CEB engages in dialogue with community stakeholders, that may occur through existing grassroot community, environmental, educational and/or developmental organizations. Researchers from the College of Social Work and UT’s Energy, Environment and Resources Center have collaborated with CEB on an environmental justice-oriented project in the Chattanooga Creek area, in preparation for a field study of the extent of polyaromatic hydrocarbon contamination in the Alton Park community. In this process, linkages have been built with the Alton Park Development Corporation and the Environmental Sciences Institute at Florida A&M. This outreach framework allows a mechanism for using university educational and technical resources to help community groups understand the technical issues involving the hazardous waste sites in their midst, and allows the empowerment of communities in order to successfully participate in the decision-making process regarding their hazardous substance problems.

Another outreach project underway at CEB seeks to train African-American and South African undergraduates in research being conducted by CEB, Princeton and the United States Geological Survey in ultradeep gold and platinum mines. The exchange program being developed will send U.S. mentors from educational institutions and national laboratories to South Africa to conduct workshops, and South African and American students will work side by side under joint supervision of project investigators or postdoctoral associates, collecting and analyzing samples for microbiological, geochemical and molecular parameters.

The Center for Environmental Biotechnology
The University of Tennessee, Knoxville
676 Dabney Hall
Knoxville, Tennessee 37996-1605
865-974-8080 | 865-974-8086 (fax)