A Medical Scientist Training Program (MSTP) is offered by Stony Brook University (SBU) in conjunction with Brookhaven National Laboratory and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. The purpose of the MSTP is to train academic medical scientists for both research and teaching in medical schools and research institutions. Graduates of the program (63 to date) are equipped to study major medical problems at the basic science level and to recognize the clinical significance of their pursuits and discoveries. Of our 61 graduates since 1990, many are in faculty positions at prestigious institutions throughout the U.S., including 3 Instructors, 11 Assistant Professors, and 4 Associate Professors. Most of these have been awarded K08, ROI, and / or POI competitive research funding from the NIH or other sources and have demonstrated research productivity since leaving SBU, in many cases with first or senior author publications in top journals such as Science, Nature, Nature Genetics, Nature Medicine, J. Clin. Invest, and Immunity. Most of the 37 graduates who received training grant support (starting with the entering class of 1992) are still in training and only 2 (6%) are in private practice. Graduate Programs in which the Ph.D. may be earned include Applied Math, Biochemistry and Structural Biology, Genetics, Molecular and Cellular Biology, Pharmacology, Microbiology, Neurobiology and Behavior, Physiology and Biophysics, and Biomedical Engineering. Each program is an independent doctoral degree- granting unit. Initiatives underway at SBU include ones in proteomics, diabetes, computational neurobiology, expansion of the hospital, and development of a cancer center. Finally, our small MSTP has diversity and flexibility that permits the design of individualized educational opportunities to meet the needs of trainees with a variety of interests, backgrounds and career goals. We anticipate 7-8 years of training to complete the MD and PhD degrees (of which this training grant will support 3 years per student). We request support for 18 trainees (out of a total of 50 projected to be in the program). The students recruited will have extensive prior research experience.
Training of physician-scientists is vital to bring discoveries made at the bench to the bedside, i.e. to have an impact on human health. This program will give rigorous scientific and medical training to highly talented students so that they can take advantage of scientific opportunities to devise and apply new types of health care, or use their medical knowledge to recognize and answer scientific questions that will advance our understanding of human physiology and create new possibilities for therapeutic intervention.
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