Because of its interdisciplinary nature, its rapid acquisition and development of new technologies, and its direct relevance to human disease, immunology is an excellent vehicle for training in basic biomedical research. Exciting new findings and the enormous potential for powerful applications to human disease continue to attract many of the best students to immunology. Increasingly, it is now possible to translate our knowledge of immunity into manipulations of T cells and inflammation in clinical applications, and many of the next generation of immunologists will find rewarding careers in translational research. We believe that the best foundation for translational research is uncompromisingly rigorous traditional PhD training, with a solid basic science basis. Scientists trained in this way have been responsible for past gains in knowledge that are now being translated into clinical applications, and will continue to play this role in the future. Nevertheless, we recognize that traditional PhD training can leave both a knowledge gap and a misunderstanding of the culture of clinical medicine that many scientists find difficult to overcome. These problems limit entry of some of the best PhD scientists into translational research. Our program incorporates several innovative features designed to help our trainees bridge this gap. The twenty-one mentors in our program lead an interactive, interdepartmental research community that covers the full range of biomedical science from genomics and proteomics, intracellular signaling pathways, cell biology, microbiology, and cellular immunology to clinical studies and trials, all centered around regulation of inflammation and T lymphocyte biology. In our program, students and postdoctoral fellows studying areas as distinct as vaccine design, immune evasion by viruses or bacteria, tumor immunology, immunopathology, transplantation, and autoimmunity benefit from learning about methods of investigation and advances in the other areas as part of this interactive research community. The goal of our program is to recruit talented and motivated students and postdoctoral fellows, provide them with a firm foundation in the latest techniques and concepts in biomedical research, expose them to translational research opportunities, and foster precision, curiosity, daring, imagination, communication, and cooperation to give them the tools they need to direct independent research programs and train the next generation of biomedical scientists.
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