MentorLinks Mentor Opens Doors & Helps Add Specialization to Biotech Program

Posted by on .

While leading a tour of Irvine Valley College's labs on February 10, Microbiology Professor Emalee Mackenzie tells c3bc Project Director Russ H. Read about her plans to add medical device manufacturing courses to the biotech offerings in Orange County, California.

As Microbiology Professor Emalee Mackenzie took in the scene of 36 medical device industry representatives and bioscience academicians in Irvine Valley College's conference space, she could not help smiling. She was happy that the professional connections she made through MentorLinks led to her hosting the Fifth Medical Device Skill Standards Meeting on February 10.

"It's all those connections, and meeting them at ATE ... that have been tremendous. Vivian opened doors and made all this possible," Mackenzie said, referring to the introductions Vivian Ngan-Winward, her MentorLinks mentor, provided at the 2015 ATE Principal Investigators Conference.

MentorLinks is a technician education program improvement initiative that the American Association of Community College offers with support from the National Science Foundation's Advanced Technological Education program. MentorLinks pairs a college team that is working on a new or revamped STEM program with a community college educator who has expertise in the target discipline for a two-year period.

One of the people Mackenzie met at the October ATE meeting in Washington, D.C., was Sengyong Lee, the chairman of the Biotechnology Department at Ivy Tech Community College (Indiana) and lead of the Medical Device Hub of the Community College Consortium for Bioscience Credentials (c3bc). During their conversation, Lee explained that the hub was trying to coordinate its meeting in California with a panel presentation of the hub-created c3bc's Medical Device Skill Standards at Medical Design and Manufacturing West Conference in Anaheim on February 9. Ngan-Winward suggested Irvine Valley College, about 20 minutes from Anaheim, as the meeting site, and the planning took off.  

The hub meeting, where the industry people and professors from the hub's 11 partner colleges talked about implementation of the skill standards, is the metaphorical tip of the iceberg of what Mackenzie says she and Irvine Valley's biotechnology program have gained through MentorLinks.

The guidance from Ngan-Winward during MentorLinks resulted in the college changing the planned specialization of its biotechnology program from cell culture to medical devices. Ngan-Winward, who was part of the c3bc team that helped develop the skill standards, also introduced Mackenzie to the c3bc skill standards when they were still a work-in-progress in 2014.

The skill standards were complete in 2015 when Mackenzie learned from Orange County bioscience employers like Edward Life Sciences—which Ngan-Winward suggested she contact for a biotech industry advisory committee—that it is more challenging for them to find qualified biomedical device technicians than cell culture technicians.

c3bc  Medical Device Skill Standards Inform Curriculum Development

She has used the c3bc Medical Device Skill Standards, which were developed nationally in partnership with industry with support from a Department of Labor grant, as the basis for a new quality assurance course and a revamped basic skills course. "It gave us direction on what the courses should be built on," she said, explaining that as a microbiologist she did not have a background in medical device manufacturing.

By using the standards that were vetted nationally with industry, Mackenzie says she feels more confident the courses she developed will meet medical device manufacturers' expectations for entry-level employees.

Basing the curriculum on the c3bc standards also accelerated the program approval process to eight months from the usual 24 months. Mackenzie said that alone was "huge." She plans to begin offering the new courses later in 2016, less than two years after Ngan-Winward became her mentor.

Ngan-Winward, who returned to industry after several years of teaching at Salt Lake Community College in Utah, said the MentorLinks process worked as intended.

Mackenzie "didn't have to build anything from scratch and she did leverage what was being done by others" throughout the ATE community. Ngan-Winward is also impressed that Mackenzie has not only successfully added a specialization to the biotechnology programs available to students in Orange County, California, but that she is also preparing to submit an ATE grant proposal in October 2016. While Ngan-Winward was on the faculty at Salt Lake Community College she was the principal investigator of the ATE grant that supported creation of STUDENTfacturED, a biomanufacturing company that continues to be operated by students.

Ngan-Winward thinks every educator, not just young faculty members like Mackenzie, would benefit from having mentors. "The more connected your mentor is with various people, that would be a value-added contact to you, then the bigger your own network can grow in a very short period of time," she said.

As Mackenzie attests, those networks open a fabulous array of new possibilities.

Categories:
  • education
  • science
  • technology
From:
    ATE Impacts
See More ATE Impacts

Comments

There are no comments yet for this entry. Please Log In to post one.