Inclusive Excellence Training Program in the Systems Biology of Cardiovascular Inflammation

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Project Summary An outstanding, diverse group of 30 faculty mentors has joined efforts across multiple departments and schools at the University of Minnesota (UMN) to form a new Ph.D. graduate training program entitled, "Inclusive Excellence Training Program in the Systems Biology of Cardiovascular Inflammation." This program fills a major void at our institution by focusing emphasis on the highly clinically relevant problem of inflammation in cardiovascular biology, obesity, diabetes and metabolism with study focus from gene to whole organism. This new predoctoral training proposal addresses a major mission of the NHLBI by focus on physiological systems training of cardiovascular and metabolic inflammation, and this new program will position trainees for diverse successful outcomes in the dynamically changing future workforce. This new training program will also fill a large void in the predoctoral training grant landscape at the UMN. Faculty mentors come from several different colleges and departments across campus, including Integrative Biology and Physiology (IBP), Biomedical Engineering, Biochemistry, Cell Biology and Genetics, Microbiology and Immunology and clinical units in Medicine, including Cardiology and Endocrinology and Metabolism, and Pediatrics. The unique focus and singular effort of this proposal is directed at training the next generation of biomedical scholars in the principles and application of Integrative and Systems Biology. In the purest sense, our focus is distilled into the mechanistic study of human physiology. By any name, whether it be physiology, integrative biology, systems biology, functional genomics, or other, this training grant’s premise is that understanding biological function from cells, to organs, to the whole living organism, represents the leading wave of new knowledge discovery in biomedical science now and in the decades to come. Graduates from this program will be well versed in quantitative approaches to biology and capable of dissecting complex mechanistic pathways in the living animal. This proposal gains considerable strength by aligning with outstanding UMN gateway graduate programs to markedly broaden and deepen the applicant pool from which we will select outstanding trainee candidates. Moreover, the proposal includes unique tailor-made academic courses in the Physiology of Inflammation and in Computational System Physiology featuring state-of-the-art computational biological and informatics approaches. These courses have been developed expressly for this new training program. Here Ph.D. trainees will gain insight into to the most urgent problems today in human patients with metabolic and cardiovascular medical disorders. Trainees will gain further experiential training in physiological research via conferences, seminars, symposia, retreats, journal clubs, and group meetings with program faculty, including physician-scientists. This program is designed to enable our graduates to pursue unique career pathways, spanning from academia to bio-industry in systems and integrative biology fields of research.