Connecting with Industry

The NRT program seeks to build new, productive relationships between academia and industry through student internships as well as collaborative projects in our KCGIP industrial partners immersion lab course.  In addition, the Lens of the Market professional development program provides a mechanism to align fundamental science with market needs, to provide strong professional development, and to launch student careers.

External industry partners and research mentors provide additional connections to MoPSCE research, providing immersion labs, and catalyzing industrial collaborations. NRT Fellows can be involved in industrial immersion labs in three primary ways: 1) UO has an active internship program that has placed nearly 100 PhD students in internships at national labs and industry in the last 15+ years. Most recently, three current students have interned at Thermo Fisher Scientific on research projects in molecular probes and sensors. 2) Our industrial partners immersion lab can be taken as an advanced elective, where NRT Fellows and Masters Participants work side-by-side at the bench on real-world industrial projects. Recent projects in this class have featured topics in molecular probes, fluorophores, and sensor devices from partners such as Abcam, Cascade Chemistry, and Thermo Fisher Scientific. 3) NRT Fellows can design their own collaborative projects either through interdisciplinary NRT research or from market-informed R&D plans out of Lens of the Market. The Fellows can adapt these projects into their own research, or they can sponsor a project in the immersion lab course to work alongside Masters-level NRT Participants. Industry connections are informed and individualized by NRT Fellows’ professional development needs and their individual development plans (IDPs).