Celebrating 19 Years of Groundbreaking Nanomedicine Education with a New Nanomedicine Master’s Program

Northeastern’s newly launched nanomedicine master’s program is the latest step in securing NU’s position at the forefront of nanomedicine education and training. Offering over 10 experiential learning courses centered around nanomedicine research, innovation, and entrepreneurship, this program is uniquely poised to train the next generation of industry leaders.

Learn more about this program from Anne van de Ven, PhD, Director of Northeastern’s nanomedicine master’s and certificate programs.

Why does nanomedicine have such broad appeal?

Nanomedicine touches our lives in so many ways, from vaccines to protect against disease, diagnostics to identify disease, medicines to treat disease, and more. The rapid development of mRNA vaccines during the pandemic has shown us that nanomedicine researchers can have a real and lasting impact on human health. We find that this opportunity is incredibly exciting to students in the U.S. and overseas.

At the same time, there are no limits on who can enter this field. Nanomedicine is a highly interdisciplinary field that is advanced through the collective efforts of scientists, engineers, clinicians, entrepreneurs, regulatory experts, and more. Anybody with an interest in nanotechnology, medicine, and biology can learn the knowledge and skills needed for a career in nanomedicine.

Northeastern has been teaching nanomedicine for nearly 20 years.  How have your early programs shaped the way you approach nanomedicine education today?

In 2005, we built the world’s first doctoral specialization program in nanomedicine. We had 54 students from 10 different STEM disciplines take classes and write dissertations about nanomedicine. This doctoral program did such a good job training students that nearly half of our graduates entered nanomedicine careers. And this was long before most people even knew what nanomedicine was.

Today, we have students from 18 different STEM disciplines attending our courses—all with the same goal—acquiring the skills and knowledge they need to make a real impact on human health. We design our courses in such a way that any student, regardless of their degree program, can get excited about nanomedicine and draw connections to their field of expertise. One of the ways we accomplish this is by giving students ownership over what they are learning by allowing students to choose and develop projects that excite them.

What inspired you to start a nanomedicine master’s program?

In all the years I have been teaching and performing research in nanomedicine, I have only seen a handful of nanomedicine education programs emerge worldwide. Unfortunately, academia has not done a good job of keeping up with industry demand for a skilled nanomedicine workforce. Today, there are many more nanomedicine jobs than people with the knowledge and skills to fill these jobs. But solving this problem is not easy.

A successful nanomedicine program requires academic institutions to be positioned near research hospitals such that students, researchers, and clinicians can collaborate and learn from each other. At the same time, we need a robust local nanomedicine industry that can provide opportunities for students to apply and practice what they are learning. The more time I spent in Boston, the more I felt that Northeastern University was perfectly poised at the center of research, medicine, and industry to support a strong nanomedicine program.     

What excites you most about Northeastern’s nanomedicine master’s program?

Creating a master’s program gave us a chance to take everything we learned from our education, research training, and co-op programs and use it to completely reimagine what a comprehensive experiential master’s program could look like. Unlike many master’s programs, which just stitch together a set of existing graduate courses, we designed our curriculum from the ground up.

We created new courses and expanded existing courses to target specific industry workforce gaps. We built signature experiential learning projects into every course with the vision of providing all students with the opportunity to apply what they are learning.

Our curriculum also integrates an industry co-op, both to build subject mastery and enhance career competitiveness. We support our students in every step of this journey, starting with career and co-op advising from the very first day each student arrives.

Nanomedicine research is constantly advancing. How do keep your courses relevant?

Over the past 12 years, I have developed a highly dynamic model of education to support continuous course innovation. All our courses are designed around the latest research in nanomedicine. We draw all our content directly from peer-reviewed literature, which allows our students to explore research—and its real-world applications—as soon as new works are published. This means that our courses and programs are constantly evolving.

We are excited to be launching our Nanomedicine Experiential Capstone course in the spring of 2025. In this hands-on laboratory course, our students get to design, synthesize, and optimize nanoparticles using the same microfluidics technologies used to produce Moderna’s mRNA vaccines.

Next year, we are launching a new course titled “Bioethics in the Age of Artificial Intelligence” to provide students with hands-on practice in identifying evidence-based solutions for modern ethical challenges in the laboratory, co-op, and workplace.

This highly dynamic education model also lets us customize what we teach to match with changing industry needs. One of the ways we do this is by offering curated selections of courses that allow students to concentrate their learning on topics such as nanoformulation research, vaccine development, and commercialization. For students seeking even more customization, we offer an elective-only concentration in which students can mix and match more than 35 graduate courses for a one-of-kind curriculum.

How did you get involved in nanomedicine?

I’m a bioengineer by training, and my goal has always been to advance healthcare and medicine. During my time as a graduate student at Rice University, I was greatly inspired by Richard Smalley, PhD, and Robert Curl, PhD, the inventors of carbon-60. Here were two Nobel-prize winners, collaborating with researchers in my department to explore whether nanotechnology could find use in medical applications. I found this research environment to be very intellectually stimulating, and it is what ultimately led me to seek ways to use nanoparticles for the early detection of cancer.

But as I was researching this problem, I came to realize just how little we know about what happens when we put nanoparticles in our bodies. The imaging techniques I ultimately developed were highly sought after by clinicians – not because they could tell us where nanoparticles go— but rather because they can help us better understand what is happening when nanoparticles fail to work.

It’s been incredible to see how the field of nanoparticle-based drug delivery and diagnostics has advanced, and I am proud to say helped play a small role in that.

What’s next for you?

Launching the MS in Nanomedicine program has been one of the greatest highlights of my career. It’s incredibly rewarding to see the excitement on students’ faces when they draw connections between their pre-existing knowledge and what they are learning. It also makes me better appreciate all the amazing teachers and mentors that led me to where I am today.

My next goal is to build a summer research training program that places our master’s students in nanomedicine laboratories around the Boston area. This could be a great bridge between their first and second years, providing them with practical hands-on experience that they can bring back to enrich their classroom learning and increase their co-op readiness. I also hope to further grow the master’s program so that we can eventually support a PhD program. More than 95% of my students and master’s applicants have indicated that would be interested in nanomedicine PhD. Now it’s my job to make that happen!