Duke postdoctoral associate Max Villa was one of 15 scholars selected to receive the 2016 Postdoctoral Enrichment Program Award from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund. The fellowship grants a total of $60,000 over three years to support the career development of underrepresented minorities conducting postdoctoral research in the United States or Canada. An engineer in Lawrence David’s lab at at Duke’s Center for Genomic and Computational Biology, Villa is using microfluidics to miniaturize cell culture systems. The technology could advance microbiome research by letting biologists see the interactions between scores of different bacterial species at once.
(This story originally appeared in Duke Today.)