This grant proposal resubmission seeks support for a highly successful predoctoral Pharmacology Training Program at the Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences (WCGSMC) that has completed an initial five-year period of funding by NIGMS. The Training Program in Pharmacological Sciences at WCGSMS is inter-departmental and inter-institutional, comprising a faculty of distinguished investigators assembled from the Weill Cornell Medical College and Sloan-Kettering Institute. 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. Each of these institutions has made a major contribution to growing their biomedical research programs, at a cost of >$1.3 billion over the next five years. The twenty-seven participating faculty are a cohesive group of world-class investigators with solid records for training future scientific leaders and scholars. During the past five years, our group of faculty trainers has been expanded with the addition of six new training labs, including several junior faculty labs. 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 become effective biomedical researchers. Together, our TG faculty has contributed to the development of 191 unusually 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 annually, including 8- 10 that training-eligible. For example, our recent entering class was comprised of 11 students, of which 10 are training-eligible - this class had a mean GPA of 3.48 and mean GRE scores of H 80 percentile. Recruited students typically receive undergraduate degrees from top universities in the USA and have had significant undergraduate research experiences. Currently, we have 69 predoctoral students in training, not counting an additional group of MD/PhDs. Among this group of 69 PhD-only predoctoral trainees, 57 are training eligible and 5 are from underrepresented minorities (URM) or physically-disabled. During our initial five years of funding, this TG will have supported the training of 14 outstanding predoctoral students in labs of 10 different faculty members;2/14 trainees were from URM or physically disabled groups. This application seeks support for the continued growth of an effective predoctoral Training Program in the Pharmacological Sciences.
This grant proposal seeks support for the continued fellowship support for outstanding PhD students who wish to train in a top-tier Pharmacology Program, hosted jointly by the Weill Cornell Medical College and Sloan-Kettering Institute. 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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