BME associate professor Matt Fisher, who is a member of the NC State Comparative Medicine Institute (CMI), has been quoted in a recent feature about how the institute is making NC State a destination for innovative research and training in biomedical sciences. The CMI encourages interdisciplinary collaborations among more than 200 biomedical sciences-focused researchers in six colleges and 26 academic departments at NC State, as well as researchers from UNC-Chapel Hill, Duke University and N.C. Central University.
“The mission of the CMI is to bring faculty together to do better research,” says Jorge Piedrahita, CMI co-director and Randall B. Terry Jr. Distinguished Professor of Translational Medicine. “Everything we do is to promote faculty and students interacting with each other.” To help spark these connections, the institute regularly hosts retreats, brainstorming sessions and other types of networking events, which have moved online since social distancing measures were put in place.
Dr Fisher agrees that the networking opportunities the CMI offers and the chances he’s had to co-lead subgroups and generate research projects have helped his career. “It’s a very supportive environment to gain leadership experience,” he says. CMI co-directors Piedrahita and Joshua Pierce are excited to keep developing future leaders of the CMI, the university and the field of biomedical sciences by creating new leadership opportunities and designing undergraduate and graduate major and minor programs. They also intend to keep bringing bright researchers together. To read the full article, visit NC State News here.