The BioBuild Program is an interdisciplinary graduate education program (IGEP) at Virginia Tech. The purpose of IGEPs is to promote and sustain interdisciplinary graduate education and research at Virginia Tech. Each IGEP addresses a major fundamental problem or complex societal issue requiring an interdisciplinary team of scholars. In case of the BioBuild Program, there are currently five faculty part of the leadership group of the program.
The BioBuild doctoral program will develop professionals with the interdisciplinary expertise necessary to create buildings and communities that are in fact bio-inspired. Our graduates will have an immediate impact in university and industrial settings and will change the relationship between the built environment and our planet. We approach this through a radical shift in how we understand buildings by bringing together faculty from departments in CAUS, CNRE, COE, and COS and collaborating with interdisciplinary university centers to develop a program that explores building systems and biological systems synergistically to discover innovative connections between these two fields. Our specific goals are to: (1) offer a Ph.D. program at the confluence of buildings and biology whose students will undergo a transformation as they progress from a disciplinary perspective to one where their views are naturally and inherently tied to the phenomena and tools that they have studied in an interdisciplinary environment; (2) produce graduates who obtain highly competitive academic and industry positions because their abilities to view grand challenges in the built and natural environments through an interdisciplinary lens gives them a competitive edge; and (3) place Virginia Tech as a global thought leader in this emerging area.
