Predoctoral Training Grant
The multidepartmental graduate program in Molecular Biology, Cell Biology and Biochemistry (MCB) has held a predoctoral training grant from NIH for more than 29 years. There are less than fifty NIH predoctoral training grants in Molecular and Cell Biology, and our continuous funding has ranked our program among the top 50 in our nation. This prestigious award is an external seal of approval, ranking our program among the top in the country. The funding afforded by the training grant has paid graduate student stipends, tuition and health fees for 7 trainees per year. It has also enhanced the activities of the entire MCB graduate program, benefiting more than just the NIH trainees.
The graduate program in Molecular and Cell Biology and Biochemistry has 55 faculty participants of whom 53 are listed as NIH trainers. The number of faculty trainers in the MCB graduate programs has nearly doubled in the past few years, reflecting several initiatives at Brown:
- 20% increase in the size of the faculty overall at Brown (including BioMed Division hires housed in new research buildings at Ship Street Laboratories for Molecular Medicine and in Sidney Frank Hall for Life Sciences)
- New multidepartmental programs in both Genetics, Genomics and Proteomics, and Computational Biology.
- The new joint graduate program between Brown and the Marine Biological Laboratory (Woods Hole, MA).
Our training faculty are productive scientists who are distinguished in their fields and have been recognized by national honors. On the average, each trainer publishes 3.1 papers/year and holds $491,502 in totals direct costs/year in research grant support. 50% of the trainers have been, or are now, on editorial boards. 51% of the faculty have currently or previously held NIH Research Career Development Awards or the equivalent. 60% of the trainers have served on study sections of funding agencies, and 36% have been meeting or session chairs. The 53 faculty trainers include current and past holders of endowed chairs at Brown. In total, all but 8 new assistant professors have held one or more of these national honors. Additional honors of the faculty trainers include service as elected officers of national scientific societies. Other national honors to our faculty include Fellow of the American Society of Microbiology, State of R.I. Governor's Award, and Membership in the National Academy of Sciences and/or the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
The time from matriculation to Ph.D. is on average 5.5 years and we have a low attrition rate. Based on their Ph.D. thesis research, trainees publish 4.5 full-length papers on average. Graduates from our program generally do postdoctoral research and 90% hold careers involving bench research (evenly divided between academia or industry/government research). Many MCB graduates are now faculty at top schools in our nation (e.g., Clemson, Columbia, Emory, Northwestern, Notre Dame, Ohio State, Purdue, Stanford, UCLA, U. Penn., U. Texas, U. Washington, U. Wisconsin, Vanderbilt, Yale).
