The Bar Harbor Story is generously sponsored by the Bar Harbor Historical Society.
BAR HARBOR—Friday afternoon, Dr. Nishad Jayasundara, one of the world’s pioneering scientists focused on the links between chronic kidney disease in farm workers and pollution, stood in the auditorium of Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory (MDIBL) and explained that this space—the biological laboratory on the coast of Bar Harbor—was where it all began.
“This is the birthplace of my science,” Dr. Jayasundara said during the celebration of 25 years of (INBRE) a state-wide collaboration of science labs, colleges, and research, August 14. “I held my first pipette here.”
Since then, he’s gone on to earn his Ph.D and start to change the world. His research at his position at Duke University is about kidney disease, water pollution, and so much more.
It started here, when he was a student at the College of the Atlantic (COA). Over 215 COA students have been the beneficiaries of INBRE.
What exactly is INBRE?
“This is a terrible acronym,” Dr. Hermann Haller, MDIBL president and professor said, August 14. “It stands for something which is far from ordinary.”
The INBRE network is led by the MDI Bio Lab and it’s a consortium of research and higher education institutions that helps young Mainers, undergraduates, and Maine to fully participate in the biomedical/biotech revolution, with its benefits for human health and high-paying jobs, according to information from the lab.
INBRE, Dr. Haller said, “strengthens Maine’s capacity to conduct cutting edge biomedical research.”
At MDIBL, Dr. Haller and Dr. James Coffman, director of the Maine IDeA Network of Biolmedical Research Excellence both outlined how INBRE helped change MDI Bio Lab from a $1 million, seasonal institution with 11 full-time employees to a $20 million year-round institution that employs more than 100 and is recognized internationally for its work.
The impact is local as well. It’s also personal.
“We haven’t had to buy so much as a pipette,” COA interim President Lynn Boulger said. They can share resources and avoid duplicating expenses.
Those 215 students, like Dr. Jayasundara and more than 3,000 others throughout Maine, have gone on to stunning degrees in science and health, she said.
Boulger went through a litany of success stories—just from COA—of people making a difference to science, to medicine, to the world.
One of those COA students was Nishad Jayasundara, Ph.D. He studied at the Bar Harbor college, graduating in 2005 before getting his Ph.D at Stanford.
“We are ridiculously proud of him,” Boulger said.
Dr. Jayasundara said his class at COA and the INBRE program which allowed him to interact and work in science with MDI Bio Lab’s David W. Towle, Ph.D. transformed what he thought about what it means to be a scientist.
“My ideas to understand and think about the kidneys was actually born at MDIBL,” he explained, August 14.
He learned how to hold a pipette, how to write a paper, and what wildness it was to dive off the docks of MDIBL and into the cold waters of the Atlantic Ocean.
“There is a tremendous legacy of that,” he said.
As Fred Bever, chief communications officer, wrote for the MDI Bio Lab, during that college program, “Jayasundara and his lab partner struggled to sequence the gene of their interest, though. Towle urged patience. ‘David said, “It’s not for everybody, but you shouldn’t give up,’” Jayasundara recalled.”
After trial and error and trial and error, the young students were finally able to make the project work. They wrote on the lab images, PPO: Persistence Pays Off.
“That was a pretty defining moment,” Dr. Jayasundara told Bever. “David was trying to do real work, not just a canned lab experiment. He was teaching us how to think, and troubleshoot, and how to go through all the steps towards identifying a gene that you’re interested in and learn to deal with the frustrations of failing.”
“I am incredibly grateful for what INBRE did for me,” Dr. Jayasundara said on Friday.
He’s not the only one.
Since it began, 25 years ago, at the MDI Bio Lab, under the careful guidance of Patricia Hand, more than 3,000 students have done hands-on biomedical research.
“While MDIBL is the lead institution, is it a very collaborative network,” Dr. Coffman said.
It’s created more than 100 Maine jobs. More Maine students are majoring in science in Maine colleges—a 65% increase and of those who participated in INBRE, 90% ended up getting advanced careers or entering scientific or medical careers. Of those, 21% pursue careers in Maine.
That’s thanks to $107 million in direct federal funding and an additional $122 million leveraged in other grants. Multiple speakers at Friday’s celebrations thanked Senator Angus King and Senator Susan Collins for helping to secure those grants.
JENNIFER HONEYCUTT
Professor Jennifer Honeycutt started out as a first generation college student at Colby.
“Jennifer then caught the research bug,” Coffman said. Now a Ph.D, she leads her own INBRE project at Bowdoin College.
The program made a difference to Dr. Honeycutt, an assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience at Bowdoin College who said she was a first-generation INBRE student, a queer-identifying person who came to college not knowing what to do. Now Dr. Honeycutt is a primary investigator at Bowdoin. The professor credits the time at the lab and the program for being the spark that changed her path.
”I felt seen. I felt accepted,” Dr. Honeycutt said in 2024. She switched her major concentration to neuroscience. Dr. Honeycutt has said that it “encouraged me to do the things that I didn’t think I could do.”
She did them, hands on, in the lab, and the rest was history for her and the 90% of INBRE graduates that pursue advanced degrees or careers in medical and science fields.
“It provides a stepping stone,” Dr. Coffman said.
JOYOUNG SHIN
“It started as a student,” she said of her connection with INBRE. She and her husband came from Seoul, Korea to the University of Maine at Presque Isle.
“I certainly did not imagine that 32 years later” she would still be here.
But she is.
“I went to college here. I built my career here,” she explained.
She raised her family here. Her roots, she said, are now here.
When she was a Bates College junior, Dr. Shin took a short course working with lobster tissue, extracting DNA and running DNA sequencing.
“It was an eye opening experience,” she said. “Looking back I think that was the moment I stopped seeing myself as only a student learning about science.”
Instead, she realized she could be a person doing science—real science, making discoveries that can help change the science of medicine and people’s lives.
“When I think about what Maine INBRE means to me,” the University of Augusta associate professor said, it represents a circle.
Twenty-two years ago, she entered the MDIBL for the first time as a student. Now she is sending her own students into the program.
Now, she gets to open the same doors to others.
SAMUEL COUSINS
Samuel Cousins graduated high school in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. He didn’t go straight to college and took an assortment of jobs, such as property maintenance, before heading to school.
And in college, he fell in love with biology.
“Biology excites me so much,” he said.
When the INBRE opportunity came, he was really excited. He could remember his dad, a high school science teacher, coming home thrilled about new innovation, telling him that the future of biology is forever changed.
Now, Cousins said, he gets to be a part of that future. The INBRE experience confirmed his passion.
In a MDIBL video, Cousins said stepping into that research he realized that “this is the career that I actually want.”
He has told the laboratory that his week with the scientists researching stem cell activity created an experience that made a difference.
“Before this it was all in my head. It was mostly book-learning,” Cousins said.
But the program allows undergraduates to work with scientists on the research, partnering, helping, learning, and doing.
“It’s totally immersive,” he said. The techniques he learned included tagging a segment of DNA so that researchers could follow that piece’s molecular activities.
The program has made a difference to Jayasundara, Honeycutt, Shin, Cousins, and it’s made a difference to thousands more.
“It’s almost an embarrassment of riches,” Dr. Coffman said.
The data science core is the crown jewel of the Maine INBRE and it’s led by Joel Graber and Benjamin King.
The INBRE team of Kristine Gilbert, Dustin Updike, Amy Pelletier meets every Tuesday at 11 a.m.
QUICK FACTS ABOUT INBRE VIA MDIBL
About MDI Biological Laboratory
For more than 125 years, MDI Bio Lab has been a center for training and research in comparative biology. In the last two decades its biomedical research has focused on aging, regeneration, and environmental toxins.
The Laboratory houses 11 research groups staffed by an international team of world-class scientists and graduate students. It also leads a statewide network of colleges, universities and research institutions that collaborate to provide training, research experiences and financial support to help young Mainers play a bigger role in today’s biomedical revolution.
Located on Maine’s rugged coast, the Laboratory’s 100+ acre campus houses research facilities, cottages, and dorms that house visiting scientists and students. It is also home to MDI Bioscience, a subsidiary working to design innovative techniques to speed the drug discovery process.
LINKS TO LEARN MORE
Photos unless otherwise credited: Carrie Jones/Bar Harbor Story
QUICK EVENT NOTICE
A copyediting glitch led to this not being posted at the August 19 section of THINGS TO DO and just in the bottom under “ongoing.”
AUGUST 19 — OPENING RECEPTION AT THE GALLERY AT SOMES SOUND’S LARGEST SHOW OF THE SEASON.
From August 19 – October 17, It’s Not What You Look At, But What You See: William Hoyt, Ernest McMullen, Rett Sturman and David Vickery will be at the Gallery at Somes Sound.
Opening Reception August 19, 5-7 pm
Featuring four New England realists responding to the world around them, with the distinct observation of accurate detail (light, form, and texture), while still capturing subjects often revealing the emotional depth beneath the surface of everyday life. It’s a disciplined practice of “seeing” rather than just looking, translating objective reality through personal perception.
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Wonderful story. After 33 years at The Jackson Laboratory, I am so proud to be part of the scientific history of Mount Desert Island. Thank you for this story.