GRADUATE TRAINING IN BIOTECHNOLOGY

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This application seeks continuing support for the 5 year period 7/96-6/01 of a NIH predoctoral training program directed at providing a cross- disciplinary educational experience in biotechnology. The Stanford program has been in existence since 7/91 and is funded through 6/96. It draws on a faculty group from 10 units and 3 Schools at the University. These units include within the School of Engineering: Chemical and Civil Engineering; within the School of Humanities and Sciences: Chemistry and Biological Sciences; and within the School of Medicine: Cell Biology, Genetics, Neurobiology, Molecular Pharmacology, Developmental Biology, and Biochemistry. The 26 faculty involved in the training program have the common goal of providing a multidisciplinary framework for exposing predoctoral students to a broad cross-section of the theoretical, experimental and computational components of biotechnology. Trainees selected for this program are among those graduate students already admitted by each of the units following their usual admissions procedures. In addition to meeting the Ph.D. requirements for their primary unit, each trainee is required to participate in a biotechnology seminar series, in seminars on biomedical ethics, in a journal club, in an annual industrial biotechnology symposium and to complete a four quarter graduate-level course requirement encompassing biochemistry, genetics, and biotechnology. These activities are designed to provide a common basis for the trainees and to give then a forum for interacting in groups that extend beyond their focused research activities. The trainees are required to have two or more of the participating faculty as members of their dissertation reading committees. These committees are formed early in the tenure of the trainee and operate to insure the dissemination of information and expertise to the trainee by preceptors from different basic science and engineering areas relate to biotechnology. Local biotechnology industries in the San Francisco Bay Area provide intellectual and physical resources to the trainees and thereby offer an opportunity for the students to access the talent that surrounds the University. In some instances, trainees may be co-advised by industrial mentors and will perform some of their research offsite at facilities made available by the industrial participants. In addition, internships, typically three months in duration, are offered to trainees in those cases where there is sufficient mutual interest between the university research efforts and the industrial counterpart to warrant such an arrangement. An annual Industrial Biotechnology Symposium is held each Spring to introduce and expose the trainees to the science and engineering being conducted in the local biotechnology industrial sector. The primary goal of the program is to have the trainees become proficient in a variety of physical, chemical, biological and computational research techniques and to provide a learning environment that cuts across the boundaries of several disciplines that are major contributors to the biotechnology enterprise. In so doing, our trainees become prepared for careers in biotechnology at both the industrial and university levels.