Predoctoral Training in Pharmacological Sciences

Enter the text here that is the new abstract information for your application. This section must be no longer than 30 lines of text. This T32 grant application seeks support for Training in the Pharmacological Sciences (TIPS) at the Weill Cornell Graduate School (WCGS). This grant will extend support for a highly successful T32 predoctoral training program with current funding slated to end on June 30, 2021. Our TIPS Program is inter-departmental and inter-institutional, comprising 33 outstanding faculty mentors from Weill Cornell Medicine and the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (22 Prof., 4 Assoc. Prof., and 5 Asst. Prof.). We provide a rich research environment for training, including state-of-the-art instrumentation and core facilities, generous space allocation for the TIPS Program, and a continuing commitment to recruiting the brightest and best new faculty. The participating faculty are a cohesive group of world-class investigators with vibrant ongoing research and solid records of training early-stage scientific leaders and scholars. We are dedicated mentors and biomedical researchers with labs that receive >$1.2M in annual average research support. Formal mentorship training is obligate for all of our faculty members and admissions committee members, and we have strict protocols in place for adding and removing training faculty members. 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 fulfill their career aspirations in the many career paths and opportunity our training offers. Notably, 97% of TIPS graduates in the past 10 years have continued in research or a research-related career. Our faculty mentors are highly-collaborative, yet with an array of research interests – providing trainees broad training opportunities in areas that include translational biomedicine, neuropharmacology, cancer biology, cell signaling, metabolism, chemical biology, synthetic chemistry, computational biology and structural biology. The Pharmacology Program uses a rigorous review process for predoctoral applicants that considers overall preparation, motivation and perceived grit, and we enroll 12-16 outstanding trainees annually (90.1% training grant-eligible). During the past 5 years, incoming students had a mean college GPA of 3.58 and 26.2 months of prior research experience. We are proud of the prominent positions held by our graduates, including past/present scientific leaders in government, academia, pharma and biotech - attesting to the impact of our training Program for training the next generation of scientists.