The Scripps Translational Science Institute (STSI) will integrate the resources and activities of several pre-eminent research, education, and clinical care institutions with the overreaching objective of identifying, inspiring, and nurturing the next generation of clinical and translational scientists, while making groundbreaking scientific discoveries in biomedical research. One of these entities, the Scripps Research Institute (TSRI), which started in 1924, is the nation's largest private not-for-profit biomedical research organization. The mission of TSRI is to make groundbreaking discoveries in the sciences that enable medical and technological innovations of tomorrow, while training versatile and creative scientists for the rapidly evolving future of science. Since the inception of the Ph.D. program in 1989, TSRI has offered students the opportunity to earn a Doctor of Philosophy degree in a fully self-contained curriculum that offers interdisciplinary training outside of the context of discrete scientific departments. Students train amongst a faculty of 221 distinguished scientists including 3 Nobel laureates and 16 members of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.TSRI provides a discovery-driven research and training environment, with approximately 800 postdoctoral fellows and 250 graduate students who last year published >1250 scientific research papers. It is not uncommon for graduate students to be mentored by more than one faculty member, one or more senior post-doctoral fellows and graduate students, and staff Ph.D. scientists, all of whom play an integral role in graduate student education. The TSRI Kellogg School of Science and Technology graduate program is consistently ranked in the top 7 in several scientific sub-disciplines, according to the U.S. News &World Report and other similar rankings. TSRI participates in a tetra-instrtutional Medical Scientist Training Program (MTSP) that is centered at the University of California, San Diego. Approximately 10 M.D. /Ph.D. candidates conduct their thesis research at TSRI annually. While there are core curricular tracks in Chemistry, Chemical Biology, Biology, Biophysics and Immunology that serve as pre-defined exemplars, the tradition at TSRI is to customize the curriculum for each student, enabled by the student-to-faculty ratio of approximately 1:1. The TSRI graduate program already has a culture of training students engaged in translational research, enabled by an effective and popular molecular medicine course initiated 3 years ago and numerous faculty who are engaged in this type of research. The ongoing training in translational research will be augmented with a new advanced molecular medicine course, enriching a formal CTSA-associated T32 graduate student curriculum track (comprising two molecular medicine courses and four elective courses) focusing on translational research, and providing a more rigorous mechanism to train the growing number of basic scientists who prefer to engage in translational research. The TSRI infrastructure will also significantly advance current programs focusing on M.D. training in translational science through a CTSA associated K12 program, leading to a Masters of Science degree in Clinical Investigation from the TSRI Kellogg School of Science and Technology, with an optional Ph.D. extension.
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