The Harvard University Faculty of Arts and Sciences Training Grant in Genetics, directed by Professor Nancy Kleckner, currently supports 20 predoctoral students in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology (MCB) and Organismic and Evolutionary Biology (OEB). The 422,000 net sq.ft. training facilities are located in Cambridge, MA in the Fairchild Biochemistry Building, the Biological Laboratories, the Museum of Comparative Zoology and the Herbarium. Graduate programs in the participating Departments involve both course work and research and lead to the Ph.D. degree. These programs provide the promising young scientists who matriculate in these Departments an opportunity to learn and develop in an exciting and challenging scientific environment. The current positions of former trainees attest to the strength and success of the Genetics Training Program in previous years. The specific goal of the Genetics Training Program is to provide predoctoral students with a sophisticated and rigorous training in genetics that enables them to appreciate and to practice genetics as a primary experimental approach to important biological problems. Graduate students in the program are required to take an advanced course in genetics during their first year and to serve for at least one semester as a teaching fellow in a course with a strong genetic component, in addition to fulfilling other graduate training requirements. Students trained in the Program are also expected to integrate genetic approaches with approaches provided by other disciplines. The training faculty for the Genetics Program now numbers 23. Scientific areas of interest represented among these faculty include neurobiology, development, DNA and chromosome behavior, gene expression, cell motility, cellular organization and compartmentalization, sexual differentiation, population biology, ecology and evolution. The core of the training faculty comprises the 14 members of the Genetics Consortium, a newly self- appointed group charged with overseeing the discipline of genetics on the Cambridge campus of Harvard University. Faculty of the Genetics Consortium are responsible for most of the formal course work in genetics on this campus at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. The remaining 9 training faculty are members whose current work has a significant genetic component. All faculty of the Genetics Training Program participate as research supervisors for predoctoral trainees. The Genetics Training Program supported by this grant began in 1978. The Program has been drastically restructured within the past year, for the first time since its inception. A series of changes provides greater focus on genetics as a discipline, a strong didactic component in genetics and a number of initiatives that not only enhance the Program specifically but also keep genetics in a position of prominence within the local scientific community as a whole. Support is requested for 16 trainees in each of the next five years.
