Predoctoral Training in Pharmacological Sciences

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Project Summary This is a “new” T32 grant application seeking support for Training in the Pharmacological Sciences (TIPS) at the Weill Cornell Graduate School (WCGS). If awarded, that grant will extend support for a highly successful active T32 predoctoral training program with current funding slated to end on June 30, 2021. Our TIPS Program is inter- departmental and inter-institutional, comprising 33 outstanding faculty mentors, assembled from the Weill Cornell Medicine and the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. We provide an exceedingly rich research environment for training, including state-of-the-art instrumentation and core facilities, a generous space allocation to the TIPS Program and a continuing commitment to recruitment of the brightest and best new faculty. Our institutions have made an unprecedented commitment to growing their biomedical research programs, with >$3 billion raised from philanthropy spent on new construction and faculty development during the past 15 years. The participating faculty are a cohesive group of world-class investigators with vibrant ongoing research and solid records of training early-stage scientific leaders and scholars. We are dedicated mentors and biomedical researchers with labs that receive an annual average research support >$1.4M. Formal mentorship training is obligate for all of our faculty members, along with implicit bias training for the faculty and admissions committee. The current faculty comprise 22 Professors, 4 Assoc. Professors and 5 Asst. Professors with protocols in place for both adding and removing training faculty members. A major emphasis of the Program is to share the excitement of discovery with trainees, cultivate the student’s capacity for critical reasoning, and instill in students all necessary skills to fulfill aspirations they possess for the diverse career opportunities afforded by the training we offer. Notably, 97% of PhD graduates during the past 10 years have continued in either research or a research-related career. Our faculty mentors are highly-collaborative, yet with diverse research interests – providing trainees broad training opportunities in areas that include translational biomedicine, neuropharmacology, cancer biology, cell signaling, metabolism, chemical biology, synthetic chemistry, computational biology and structural biology. The Pharmacology Program has adopted a holistic review process for predoctoral applicants and enrolls 12-16 outstanding trainees annually. Among the total group of 88 enrolled or incoming trainees, 90.1% are training-eligible and 24.3% of these are from URiM groups. During the past 5 years, incoming students had a mean college GPA of 3.58 and 26.2 months of prior research experience. The GRE exam is no longer used as an admissions metric and we have migrated to a holistic review process for selection of candidates that considers overall preparation, motivation and perceived grit. Our 2020 incoming Pharmacology Program class is a group of 15 trainees, with 14 that are training-eligible and 2 from minority/diversity groups. We are proud of the prominent positions held by our graduates, including past/present scientific leaders in government, academia, pharma and biotech - attesting to the benefit of our training Program.