The Therapeutic Sciences graduate program offers students an intimate, congenial and collaborative learning environment that draws upon faculty experts from the life and physical science departments, as well as physician-scientists at affiliated hospitals.
The Therapeutic Sciences PhD Program was developed to be an expansion and integration of our longstanding PhD programs in Molecular Pharmacology & Physiology (MPP) and Biotechnology (Biotech). Although the Therapeutic Sciences PhD still covers pharmacology, physiology and biotechnology, it also includes other fields that are part of the broader, expanding discipline of therapeutics. For example, the program includes studies of drug targets in the immune system that are important in treating infectious diseases, characterization of brain mechanisms of addiction with an eye toward therapy, studies of molecular interactions in disease processes, understanding and preventing cancer growth and metastasis, and applications of cell- and tissue-based therapies, to name a few of the research foci. Thus, TSGP offers advanced training appropriate for academic and research careers in the fields of biology and medical sciences with a focus on determining disease mechanisms and drug actions, and developing novel therapies. The PhD program is funded in part by an NIH training grant (T32) through the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) Program in Pharmacological Sciences.
Additional Resources
All graduate student research is carried out in faculty research laboratories. In addition to all of the basic research equipment, tools, and facilities, major shared facilities include an electron microscope facility, which houses two high-resolution transmission electron microscopes and a scanning electron microscope; a professionally staffed animal-care facility fully equipped for animal maintenance, large animal surgery, and experimentation; an artificial-organ laboratory; an NMR facility with an 850 MHz (with cryogenic probe) spectrometer; a mouse transgenic and knockout core facility; a proteomics core facility including a Biacore T-100; and a molecular genetics core facility with the capacity to analyze gene-chips are available.