The transition from classroom to exam room is sometimes not easy, and many biomedical students can get frustrated by a lack of clinical practice in their academic curriculum.
To address this, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute announced this week it would grant a total of $16 million to 23 graduate schools to help them integrate clinical practice into their biomedical Ph.D. programs. The grants, $700,000 each over a span of four years, can go toward developing new graduate programs or enhancing existing ones.
The aim is to foster the development of scientists who can translate research discoveries into new medical treatments and diagnostics to improve public health.
"We need to increase the number of scientists who can work at the transition between science and medicine by doing high quality, medically relevant research," said Peter J. Bruns, HHMI’s vice president for grants and special programs.
The $16-million commitment is part of the Med into Grad initiative, launched in 2005 as an "experiment" to figure out how graduate schools could provide doctoral students with the skills to investigate the scientific mechanisms of disease, and to translate their discoveries into clinically relevant treatments and diagnostics. The initial round of funding gave a total of $10 million to 13 schools.
Since its inception, Bruns has found that an added bonus for participating graduate schools is that they attract more high-quality candidates.
"We’ve found this is something students are really hungry for," he said of the Med into Grad curriculum.
HHMI, a nonprofit medical research organization, is considered one of the nation’s largest philanthropies. In the fiscal year 2009, it spent $730 million on research and disbursed $101 million in grant support for science education.
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