Wilson College Research Projects Awarded External Funding

It may be surprising to learn there are similarities between human cell tissue and textiles. Wilson College of Textiles Assistant Professor Jessica Gluck focuses her work in this interdisciplinary research.

“My lab is essentially trying to look at what it is about your tissue that helps all of the cells of your body function the way that they’re supposed to. If you were to take tissue from your body and take all the cells out of it and then look at it under a microscope, you would see that it looks very porous,” Gluck says. “It works out really well with being at the Wilson College of Textiles, because we can recreate what it is that we’re seeing in the tissue. By doing that, we can control how big the fibers are and how big the pores are.”

Gluck also serves as the Director of Education and Training at the Comparative Medicine Institute (CMI), an interdisciplinary health research center at NC State, that has enabled a lot of her research to take place.

Research Funding

CMI awards competitive funding for different projects each year through seed grants and their Ideation Awards.

“A lot of the seed grants that they give have a condition where you have to be working with somebody else who isn’t necessarily in your field,” Gluck says. “This really helps facilitate a lot of collaboration with people that you wouldn’t necessarily work with before.”

The Wilson College won funding for four different projects this year as part of the CMI’s Think, Collaborate and Do Ideation Awards.

The interdisciplinary focus of CMI promotes collaboration and networking across NC State’s campus and uncovers new areas of research.

“This partnership also enables our faculty to pursue other opportunities. They start with collaboration with CMI, but they develop collaborations with faculties in CMI and also other colleges at NC State,” Associate Dean for Research Xiangwu Zhang says. “This enables us to enter new research areas that other people can’t.” 

Student Involvement

CMI supports the Young Scholars Program, which funds graduate interdisciplinary student teams and provides seed funding for the project, as well as funding to hire and support an undergraduate student for summer work. Gluck’s role is rooted in education and preparation. All summer, she is running different workshops for students participating in the research programs. 

The summer workshops are supporting these CMI-funded teams, as well as other training programs heavily invested in both interdisciplinary work and the student teams. They are centered around teaching undergraduate students how to perform and present research and teaching the graduate students how to be good teachers and mentors.

“One of the things we’ve talked about is that students are going to communicate in different ways. From a mentor’s side of things, you have to figure out how to reach them where they are, instead of expecting them to meet you,” Gluck says. “From what I’ve heard, the students have said those workshops have been pretty helpful in getting the lab culture established.”

CMI works with colleges across NC State’s campus, but has many connections with Wilson College. Gluck attributes this to the college’s faculty’s ability to think outside the box.

“I think as a college, we’re really good at seeing ‘Okay, I do this type of a science, and it’s traditionally applied in this path, but it could very easily be applied in all these different scenarios,’” Gluck says. “A lot of faculty that haven’t done anything in the medicine field are now starting to work in that field because they figured out a way to make their science applicable.”

The Wilson College’s partnership with the institute has a promising potential for the future. 

“Projects with CMI are new and creative innovation and though typically start small, they may lead to much larger, externally funded projects,” Zhang says.