St. Jude Graduate School Seeks Applicants

St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital is another step closer to launching its new on-campus biomedical sciences graduate school, with the window for applications from potential students now open.

According to Brian Walton, the new school’s associate dean, the window that opened Sept. 1 already has resulted in a pool of almost 40 applicants. Thirty-seven applications are in progress – prospective students can start and come back to it later, without having to complete it all at once – and one has already been completed.

St. Jude is looking to pick between 10 and 15 or so for the first group in the new graduate program, with the first class starting their studies in August 2017.

The new graduate students would complement other such students already on St. Jude’s campus, albeit ones who are affiliated with different schools. For example, St. Jude plans to continue working with the University of Tennessee Health Science Center to keep offering its students the opportunity to do research and thesis work at St. Jude.

For the new graduate program, which dean Stephen White said is being built from scratch, the goal is simple: train the next generation of scientists to fight catastrophic diseases and discover new cures and treatments.

And that first program will focus especially on pediatric research.

“The trick is to be unique,” White said of the program, which has its own custom-designed space in the Marlo Thomas Center for Global Education and Collaboration on campus. “There’s many, many fantastic programs in the U.S. and even locally. So the trick is to be unique. And I think our uniqueness is translational studies, which means taking the research we do and applying it to patient care in a pediatric setting.

“The students will have access not only to top research but top clinical people. That’s the vision – to train a generation of researchers with expertise in traditional pediatric research.”

Each year, St. Jude will be working to bring another 12 or so students into the five-year program, so that at the end of five years a running total of about 60 students will be enrolled. The students, Walton said, will at the end of their first year of curriculum take an exam that allows them to continue on to do their Ph.D. thesis research.

Classes, he continued, will run Monday through Friday roughly from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Members of St. Jude’s roughly 70-strong science faculty and 30- to 35-member clinical faculty on campus will participate in the instruction.

In addition to the hands-on training, students will have access to state-of-the-art technology and practical professional education.

“One thing modern students need is professional training,” White said. “How to write grants, how to present their work. How to do things like dealing with lawyers and patients and that type of thing. So we have a very good professional development program built into the curriculum.

“We’re going to teach them how to write grants. So we also have a professional scientific writing course we’ve put together. The end product of that course will actually be a grant. They will have to write a federal grant by the end of their second year and submit that grant to a body like the (National Institutes of Health).”