This application seeks continued support for the 5-year period 7/01/01-6/30/06 for a NIH training program directed at providing predoctoral graduate students with a cross-disciplinary educational experience in biotechnology. The Stanford program began on 7/01/91 and currently is funded through 6/30/01. It draws on a faculty group from 14 departments and 3 Schools at the University. These departments include within the School of Engineering: Chemical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Civil & Environmental Engineering; within the School of Humanities and Sciences: Biological Sciences and Chemistry; and within the School of Medicine: Biochemistry, Developmental Biology, Genetics, Molecular Pharmacology, Molecular and Cellular Physiology, Neurobiology, Neurology, Radiology and Structural Biology. The 36 faculty involved in this training program have the common goal of providing a multidisciplinary framework, within which predoctoral students are exposed to a broad cross-section of the theoretical, experimental, and computational components of biotechnology. Trainees selected for this program are graduate students who already have been admitted to a predoctoral program following the usual admissions procedures of the participating departments or programs to which they are affiliated. Special non-departmental admitting programs include the Biophysics Program and the Neuroscience Ph.D. Program. In addition to meeting the Ph.D. requirements for their primary department, each trainee is required to participate in a biotechnology seminar series, in seminars on biomedical ethics, in a journal club, and in an annual industrial biotechnology symposium. Trainees also complete a graduate-level sequence of courses that encompasses biochemistry, genetics, and biotechnology. All these activities are designed to provide an interdisciplinary foundation and forum for trainee interaction in groups that extend beyond focused individual research activities. Furthermore, trainees are encouraged to include on their dissertation reading committees two or more of the participating faculty. Reading committees are formed early in the tenure of the trainee, and one of their primary functions is to insure the dissemination of information and expertise to the trainee by preceptors from multiple basic science and engineering departments related to biotechnology. Local biotechnology industries in the San Francisco Bay Area provide intellectual and physical resources to the trainees. An annual Industrial Biotechnology Symposium held each spring introduces and exposes the trainees to the science and engineering being conducted in the regional biotechnology industrial sector and offers them opportunities to access the talent that surrounds the University. In certain instances, trainees perform some of their research offsite at facilities made available by our Industrial Partners and also may be co-advised by industrial mentors. In addition, internships, typically one academic quarter or three months in duration are offered to trainees in those cases where there is sufficient mutual interest between the university research efforts and the industrial partners to warrant such an arrangement. The primary goals of this predoctoral program are to teach the trainees to become proficient with a wide variety of physical, chemical, biological, and computational research techniques and to provide a supportive learning community that cuts across the boundaries of these 14 departments or disciplines which are major contributors to the biotechnology enterprise. By so doing, our trainees re better prepared for careers in biotechnology in both industry and academia.
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