A mechanical engineering postdoctoral researcher at Montana State University has won a highly competitive eFellows fellowship from the National Science Foundation to explore complex communities of microscopic organisms called biofilms. Ghazal Vahidi earned her doctoral degree from MSU in 2024. The fellowship carries with it a $259,200 award over two years.
The NSF eFellows program, which is administered by the American Society for Engineering Education, awards university research postdoctoral fellowships to scholars in the first years after earning their doctorates in engineering fields. In addition to hands-on academic research with a faculty adviser, each postdoc will participate in professional development and mentoring activities designed to prepare them for future research careers.
Vahidi, who earned her Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from MSU in 2024, stayed on to conduct postdoctoral research. She is affiliated with the university’s Center for Biofilm Engineering, which is housed in the Norm Asbjornson College of Engineering. Biofilms are groupings of microbes encased within a self-produced slime. Examples of biofilms include plaque on teeth, the muck that sometimes grows inside plumbing fixtures, and the slippery coating commonly found on rocks in streams, rivers and lakes. More worrisome biofilms can take root in chronic wounds, such as a diabetic foot ulcer, or form on implanted medical devices or urinary catheters. Biofilms are also what make the lung disease cystic fibrosis so hard to treat effectively. One of the goals of biofilm research is to develop ways to eradicate biofilms from surfaces.
Vahidi’s research focuses on studying biofilms as “multi-domain composite materials,” or the biofilms that simultaneously contain a variety of microscopic organisms that could include bacteria, fungi and/or algae. This approach, she said, more accurately reflects the compositional makeup of biofilms in the real world, as opposed to single-domain biofilms that are commonly studied in labs.
“Multi-domain biofilms are understudied because they’re really hard to grow in the lab and even harder to fully characterize,” Vahidi said. “This is one of the biofilm research areas where the CBE is among the leaders in the field, and I feel lucky to be part of it.”
Vahidi’s work is interdisciplinary in nature, spanning the fields of mechanical engineering, microbiology and microscopy.
“I’ve watched her evolve into a postdoctoral researcher with technical expertise that spans several interdisciplinary fields,” said Lewis Cox, an associate professor of mechanical and industrial engineering who runs MSU’s Mechanics of Structured Materials Lab. He also serves as Vahidi’s adviser on the NSF eFellows grant. “She approaches new challenges with preparation and thoughtful questions, tackles complex characterization techniques with enthusiasm and is a paragon of productivity. This award is a reflection of both her scientific excellence and the community she has built around her.”
“This award strengthens my belief in the community I chose at Montana State University,” Vahidi said. “Supportive and truly collaborative scientific environments are not guaranteed, and I feel fortunate to be part of one that values shared growth. The encouragement and trust from my mentors and colleagues made this possible. The eFellows program feels both like recognition of where I have been and an investment in where I am going.”
The aim of this NSF-funded project, Vahidi said, is twofold. First, she is working to bridge the gap between biological and materials sciences by establishing a new analytical framework to correlatively measure the structure, chemistry and mechanical properties of complex biological materials. Second, she wants to understand how different microbes, and the surfaces they grow on, shape the physical and chemical properties of biofilms. These insights contribute to a broader effort to understand how biofilms grow and persist across environments relevant to health care, industry and natural systems.
“The infections that are in our bodies or the biodeterioration of protective coatings that are happening due to biofilms are often not caused by a single bacterium or a single fungus,” Vahidi said. “They happen because these organisms come together and work together.”
Vahidi said she is developing a novel characterization approach to understand multi-domain biofilms’ structural properties, to understand mechanical properties at nanoscale resolution and to understand composition. Toward that end, she spends a great deal of time in the CBE’s Bioimaging and Analytical Core Lab, a university-wide core facility directed by Heidi Smith, assistant research professor of microbiology and cell biology, who, along with Brent Peyton, distinguished professor of chemical and biological engineering, co-advise Vahidi’s current postdoctoral work.
In addition to offering powerful magnification tools such as confocal imaging, which enables researchers to explore the 3D structural properties of a sample, the facility makes available Raman spectroscopy, which is instrumentation that can chemically analyze samples. Vahidi also conducts atomic force microscopy in another MSU core facility, the Imaging and Chemical Analysis Laboratory – or ICAL. The instrument generates nanoscale topographic maps and measures mechanical properties of materials.
Understanding the properties of how multi-domain biofilms directly interact with surfaces, attach to and are removed from surfaces, will likely lead to new strategies to remove biofilms from surfaces more efficiently.
“The most important step in controlling biofilms is understanding them,” Vahidi said.