Training Program on Genetic Variation and Human Phenotypes

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Project Summary: The Vanderbilt Training Program in Genetic Variation and Human Phenotypes supports predoctoral students in human genetics. We request funding for 8 predoctoral students, funded for two years. The mission of this program is to prepare these students for a successful career in human genetics in an academic, industrial, or public service capacity. We prepare our students beginning with skills-focused classroom instruction and transitioning to experienced- based learning through research and active collaboration with more experienced mentors. Students are regularly exposed to leaders in human genetics research through their collaborations, research seminars, and attendance at national and international meetings. This training program has enjoyed broad success, with our students achieving excellent productivity (mean 5.1, range 2-11, publications during graduate school by recently funded students). Student excitement for human genetics training has rapidly increased, demonstrated by a 3-fold increase in the number of students entering the Vanderbilt Human Genetics (HGEN) PhD program over the past 5 years. Much of that increased excitement has grown from the unprecedented data available now to students. Previously, it could take years of career advancement to assemble even a single large-scale cohort of a single phenotype. However, with the advent of large biobanks with clinical data, cohorts can now be assembled relatively quickly by graduate students with the proper training, which our program provides. The Vanderbilt HGEN program has been at the forefront of training graduate students in this new type of research. With Vanderbilt’s own large- scale biobank (BioVU), and now the Data and Research Center for the NIH “All of Us” program located in the Vanderbilt University Medical Center, our graduate students have been getting both hands-on and formal didactic training in this new and groundbreaking type of research. With the establishment in 2015 of the Vanderbilt Genetics Institute, Vanderbilt has committed substantial resources for recruitment of faculty in genetics and genomics and additional investment in genotyping of biobank subjects. Our graduate students are well-rounded biologists, with most matriculating through the Interdisciplinary Graduate Program (IGP) at Vanderbilt and the rest from the Quantitative & Chemical Biology Program (QCB). They conduct research in an amazing variety of topics and publish as graduate students in the top scientific journals. Their education is clearly empowering them, as the students themselves are major designers of their own collaborative research within Vanderbilt, and they rightly feel that they are not just benefitting from the excitement in the field of human genetics today but are also driving it.