Training in Pharmacological Sciences

Enter the text here that is the new abstract information for your application. This renewal application requests twelve training slots to support graduate students in the Harvard Therapeutics Graduate Program (TGP) during their second and/or third year of training. Demographic trends are increasing the need for targeted drug treatments, and there is growing optimism for treating historically untreatable diseases based on recent scientific developments in areas such as inflammation and the emergence of new drug modalities such as antibodies and oligonucleotides. Many research schools and hospitals are building translational research centers, often in collaboration with local industry, and these need to recruit well-trained faculty and PhD-level staff. The biopharma industry has exploded in Massachusetts in the last decade, and many PhD-level positions remain unfilled. The TGP seeks to train the next generation of leaders in these fields and recruits students from all 13 Harvard Integrated Life Sciences (HILS) PhD programs to build a community of scholars committed to translational biomedical research and development. Our program consists of a robust required core curriculum, paracurricular activities focused on professional skills development, and a signature required internship, where students spend 2–4 months in an industrial or regulatory science setting, usually by the end of their 4th year. Through these programmatic elements, trainees receive exceptional intellectual, practical, and professional skills development focused on the science of drug discovery, evaluation, and clinical use and distribution. Paramount to our training goals is a strong emphasis on research rigor, reproducibility, and the conduct of science. TGP faculty, recruited from multiple HMS and Harvard programs, including the Biological and Biomedical Sciences (BBS), Chemical Biology, and Systems Biology graduate programs at Harvard Medical School (HMS), Harvard University, and the HMS-affiliated teaching hospitals, will be evaluated for the scientific relevance of their research, their mentoring skills, and their commitment to student-centric training experiences. Central to our mission is to help expand the biomedical research pipeline and add intellectual breadth to research endeavors. The TGP boosts student resilience through career preparedness, and highlights the importance of translational research in improving health for all. Furthermore, trainees are granted access to many industry professionals and networking opportunities in our courses, paracurricular activities, and the required internship. In conjunction with institutional efforts, our training platform helps to bend the arc of graduate training towards student-centric modalities and train future scholars to be pioneers in therapeutic science.