Today, 18 Texas high school seniors will be the first-ever cohort to graduate BioFORCE, a STEM summer program provided by the National Center for Therapeutics Manufacturing (NCTM), a joint center of Texas A&M University and the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station (TEES). Over the last three summers, these students have performed bacterial transformation, toured world-class pharmaceutical companies and research labs across the state, and even trained on the same type of bioprocess equipment used to manufacture vaccines worldwide.