The Training Program

Brandeis University is a liberal arts university with a strong commitment to undergraduate and graduate education and research. There are approximately 3000 undergraduate and 1000 graduate students. Of the 1000 graduate students, over 140 of them are found in the following four life sciences graduate programs: neuroscience, cell and molecular biology, biochemistry, and biophysics and structural biology.

Participating laboratories routinely have a mix of undergraduates doing senior honors theses or other research projects, graduate students doing Ph.D. work, and postdoctoral fellows doing research. At present, the participating laboratories house 35 undergraduates, 53 graduate students and about 45 postdoctoral fellows.

Our educational goal is to take students from backgrounds in the life sciences and the physical sciences who want to pursue careers in quantitative biology, and prepare them to be effective researchers and educators in this emerging field. The program has three important components:

1. broadening the students' base of knowledge and their ways of thinking about problems,
2. developing effective skills of interdisciplinary collaboration and communication, and
3. performing cutting edge research in the field.

The education and training component of the program will be implemented through a combination of formal courses emphasizing collaboration and presentation in addition to the intellectual course content, rotations in research laboratories, and special co-curricular programs aimed at team building, communications, and outreach beyond the local scientific research community. During their thesis research, IGERT trainees will continue to interact with one another, and also serve as mentors for more junior IGERT students and summer undergraduate fellows