The Bioreactor: An Innovative PhD program at Swinburne University of Technology The Swinburne Bioreactor is an ARC Training Centre with a focus on embedding an international cohort of students within industry to create the next generation of entrepreneurs and medical technology innovators within Australia.
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he ARC Training Centre in Biodevices—also known as the Bioreactor—at Swinburne University of Technology is an exciting new program that takes 10 PhD candidates from across the globe and places them in an industry-centric research and development setting. The overarching aim of the Centre is to produce transdisciplinary, industry-ready PhD graduates who can either go straight into an industry role or alternatively create their own med-tech startup, further contributing to the emerging high-tech industries both in Australia and around the world. The students were selected from over sixty applicants from across the globe through a grueling application process in which novel techniques—such as the creation of a short YouTube video detailing their motivation—were used to gain further insight to their personality and drive to undertake the program. The final ten candidates were chosen from fields such as biomedical engineering, e-health, industrial design, medical practice, mechanical engineering and bioethics and from countries as diverse as Switzerland and Ghana. This multinational and multidisciplinary team was then placed into three groups with a mixture of diverse skills and experiences to foster collaboration and a sense of esprit de corps amongst the team members. Supporting the students are three post-doctoral fellows; their role is to help oversee and mentor the students, with their discipline specialties being business, materials science and design. The post-doctoral fellows also conduct independent research with the industry partners, allowing a constant flow of knowledge and innovation to occur within the centre.
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The industry partners in the program are equally diverse; Aqua Diagnostic, Blamey Saunders Hears, Grey Innovation, MiniFAB, Optotech, Small Technologies Cluster, St Vincent’s Hospital Melbourne, Streamline Solutions and the Victorian Centre for Advanced Materials Manufacturing. Each of these partners has contributed to the running costs of the Centre and has provided a significant amount of time and mentorship to the candidates to help them understand their market sector, the user group and problems surrounding their particular sphere of research. As opposed to a more traditional PhD investigation, each candidate was tasked to generate one hundred ‘needs’, which were identified through interviews and observations with clinicians, end users and industry partners in concert with a traditional literature review, as opposed to being given a prescriptive topic. Various metrics, such as potential market size, scale of the problem, suitability for a PhDlevel investigation, etc. were undertaken to then filter the ideas to initially ten needs, with a final level of filtering providing each student with three strong needs that have been identified. Within these three needs, a business case—alongside an understanding of the regulatory framework—is presented to the industry partner in a ‘Shark Tank’ style pitch. This pitch also allows the industry partner to contribute to the proposed investigation and understand where support can be given to the student. Following this pitch session, the students and industry partner proceed on one concept and this forms the basis of their PhD. Their experience will be slightly different from the more traditional, labbased PhD program; they will be embedded within industry and will
grassROOTS | SUMMER 2015