This T32 Training Grant application seeks continued support for a highly successful predoctoral Pharmacology Training Program at the Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences (WCGSMC). Our Pharmacological Sciences training program is inter-departmental and inter-institutional, comprising a faculty of distinguished investigators assembled from the Weill Cornell Medical College and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. These institutions provide an exceedingly rich research environment, including state-of-the-art instrumentation and core facilities, a generous space allocation to the Pharmacology Program and a continuing commitment to recruiting the brightest and best new faculty. Our institutions have made an unprecedented commitment to growing their biomedical research programs, with over $2 billion raised from philanthropy and spent on new construction and faculty development during the past 5 years. The twenty-six participating faculty are a cohesive group of world-class investigators with solid records for training future scientific leaders and scholars. We are all NIH RO1-supported mentors, including 20 Professors, 4 Assoc. Professors and 2 Asst. Professors. 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. Together, our TG faculty has contributed to the development of 196 wonderfully enthusiastic and productive predoctoral trainees during the past 10 years. Our faculty mentors are highly-collaborative and have diverse research interests - they provide trainees with broad research opportunities in the areas of translational biomedicine, cardiovascular pharmacology, neuropharmacology, cancer biology, cell signaling, metabolism, chemical biology, synthetic chemistry, computational biology and structural biology. The Program typically enrolls 10-12 outstanding predoctoral students For example, our 2015 entering class was comprised of 12 students, of which 11 are training-eligible and 2 of these are from minority/diversity groups. Not counting this incoming class that enter during Fall 2015, we currently have 49 Pharmacology Program PhD candidates in training. Among this group, 47 are training eligible and 6 are from underrepresented minority/diversity groups. These students had a mean college GPA of 3.62 and mean GRE scores of ?80 percentile Recruited students typically receive undergraduate degrees from top universities in the USA and have had significant undergraduate research experiences. During our initial eight years of T32 funding, this TG will have supported the training of 26 outstanding predoctoral students in the labs of 16 different faculty members, 4/26 trainees from minority/diversity groups. We are proud of the prominent positions held by our graduates, attesting to the benefit of the training provided by our Program.
This T32 grant proposal seeks continued support for PhD training in the Pharmacological Sciences. We have a top-tier Pharmacology Program that was established in 1952, hosted jointly by the Weill Cornell Medical College and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC). Our faculty is a group of highly productive biomedical researchers who share the aspiration to develop the next generation of scientists and create innovative therapies that will better our world.
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