FAU wins $400,000 NSF grant to boost STEM workforce readiness

Florida Atlantic University has secured a $400,000 grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation to confront one of the most pressing mismatches in American higher education: the widening gulf between what undergraduates learn in STEM classrooms and laboratories and what the nation’s rapidly expanding biotechnology and life sciences industries actually demand from their entry-level hires. The three-year project, titled “Research to Reality: Connecting Discovery, Industry, and Innovation to Accelerate Workforce Readiness,” will test a framework designed to fuse scientific discovery with genuine workforce preparation, drawing on FAU’s research infrastructure, entrepreneurship programs and a network of industry and regional life sciences partnerships.

The timing of the initiative is hardly accidental. The U.S. bioeconomy is expanding at a pace that few sectors can match, propelled by converging advances in biotechnology, engineering biology, artificial intelligence and data-intensive research. Analysts project the sector could contribute as much as $4 trillion annually to the global economy and sustain more than one million U.S. jobs by 2030. Yet the talent pipeline feeding that growth remains clogged by a stubborn problem: many STEM graduates arrive in the workplace with solid theoretical grounding but little practical experience applying that knowledge to real-world problems. Employers increasingly report that new hires lack not only technical competencies such as data management and quality control, but also the professional skills—communication, teamwork, critical thinking—that modern bioscience careers require.

Undergraduates sit at the center of this challenge because they constitute the primary pipeline into entry-level bioscience positions. Traditional laboratory coursework, however, often fails to replicate the messy, collaborative and constraint-laden conditions of industrial research and development. Students may master standard protocols without ever confronting the questions that dominate actual biotech careers: whether a discovery is feasible at scale, who would benefit from it, how its value should be communicated to stakeholders, and what resources and regulatory constraints shape its path from bench to market. The FAU project aims to make precisely those experiences a central feature of the undergraduate curriculum rather than an afterthought.

The initiative is supported through NSF’s Improving Undergraduate STEM Education program, specifically its Engaged Student Learning track, which funds the development, exploration and implementation of promising approaches for improving how STEM is taught and learned. Leading the effort is principal investigator Bethany A. Stanhope, Ph.D., executive director of academic operations at FAU’s John D. MacArthur Campus in Jupiter, alongside co-principal investigator Kelsie M. Bernot, Ph.D., an assistant professor of biology at FAU’s Harriet L. Wilkes Honors College. The two researchers will coordinate a multi-college team that spans the university’s entrepreneurial, engineering and scientific units.

“This grant gives us an opportunity to rethink how we prepare students for the life sciences workforce by bringing the realities of research, industry and innovation directly into the undergraduate experience,” Stanhope said in announcing the award. “Students need more than scientific knowledge; they need opportunities to solve authentic problems, work in teams, communicate their ideas and understand how research translates into real-world applications. This project will help us identify and strengthen those experiences so students graduate with the confidence, skills and practical experience to succeed in the rapidly evolving life sciences workforce.”

At the heart of the project lies a “Research to Reality” framework that weaves together four mutually reinforcing strands. First, students will participate in industry-informed research experiences, in which laboratory projects are designed to reflect the priorities, standards and workflows of commercial bioscience. Second, entrepreneurship and innovation education will challenge students to consider what happens when a scientific idea must leave the laboratory—grappling with feasibility, market relevance, intellectual property and implementation strategy. Third, internships and structured industry experiences will place students directly inside regional life sciences organizations. Fourth, AI-enabled research modules will introduce students to the computational tools and data-driven methods that increasingly define modern biological research, from machine-assisted analysis to automated experimental design.

The research team will systematically evaluate how these combined experiences affect students’ technical and professional skills, their capacity for scientific problem-solving, their career confidence and their understanding of pathways into the life sciences workforce. Beyond the immediate benefits to FAU students, the project is structured to generate transferable knowledge: by documenting which practices most effectively strengthen career readiness, and by developing scalable resources, the team intends to produce approaches that institutions across the country can adapt to their own contexts. In this sense, the grant functions as both a direct intervention and a national experiment in workforce-aligned STEM pedagogy.

Bernot emphasized that the entrepreneurship component is not simply about teaching students to launch startups, but about transforming how they perceive the purpose of their scientific training. “An important part of this project is helping students understand that scientific discovery is only one part of the journey,” she said. “We want students to experience what happens when an idea has to move from the laboratory toward a real-world application. That means asking whether an idea is feasible, understanding who it could benefit, communicating its value, considering resources and constraints, and thinking creatively about implementation. By integrating entrepreneurship and innovation into STEM learning, we can give students a different way to see their scientific training and the many ways they can use it in their careers.”

A distinctive feature of the project is its commitment to equity and access. The team will expand research, internship and workforce opportunities through early-engagement programming and transfer-focused initiatives, with deliberate attention to first-generation students, who often face the steepest barriers to informal networks, unpaid research opportunities and career mentorship. Because transfer students frequently arrive at four-year institutions with limited time to build the relationships and experiences that employers value, early and structured engagement can meaningfully alter their career trajectories. FAU’s partnerships with industry and organizations such as BioFlorida—the state’s life sciences trade association—will anchor these efforts, connecting academic training directly to documented workforce needs.

The project team extends well beyond the two principal investigators, reflecting the interdisciplinary character of the challenge. Kevin Cox, Ph.D., senior instructor and director of the Florida Atlantic Entrepreneurship Institute within FAU’s College of Business, will lead the innovation and entrepreneurship components. Raquel Assis, Ph.D., associate dean and associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Department of Biomedical Engineering within the College of Engineering and Computer Science, contributes expertise in computational methods and biomedical technology. Rodrigo Pena, Ph.D., an assistant professor of biological sciences in the Charles E. Schmidt College of Science, rounds out the team with deep biological sciences expertise.

For FAU, the award reinforces a broader institutional strategy. The university, which serves more than 32,000 students in South Florida and ranks among the top 100 public universities according to U.S. News & World Report, holds Carnegie Foundation designations for R1 research, opportunity and community engagement—one of only 13 institutions nationwide to achieve all three. Its strategic plan, “2031FAU: Where Tomorrow Begins,” explicitly prioritizes career-ready education and experiential learning, making the NSF project a natural extension of institutional identity. The university has also positioned itself at the forefront of emerging technologies as Florida’s first “quantum university,” while maintaining signature strengths in neuroscience and healthy aging, environmental and coastal innovation, and national defense and autonomous systems.

The broader significance of the project lies in what it may reveal about the future of undergraduate science education itself. As artificial intelligence reshapes laboratory workflows and the bioeconomy blurs the boundaries between academic research, entrepreneurship and industrial production, the traditional lecture-and-lab model faces mounting pressure to evolve. If the “Research to Reality” framework demonstrates measurable gains in career readiness—particularly among first-generation and transfer students—it could offer a replicable blueprint for universities nationwide seeking to align STEM education with the demands of a trillion-dollar economic transformation. Over the next three years, FAU’s researchers will be watching closely not only what their students learn, but how those lessons might reshape the undergraduate experience far beyond Jupiter, Florida.