Ph.D. Program - Prospective Students
The immunology program is one of many Biosciences programs at the School of Medicine. We welcome applications from students with a variety of scientific backgrounds and believe that diversity of previous experience enriches our multidisciplinary environment. For more information on graduate studies in immunology, or the Biosciences PhD Programs in general, please visit the Biosciences PhD Programs web site.
TO APPLY or for more information on the admissions process, please visit the Biosciences PhD Admissions page. If you are interested in the Computational and Systems Immunology track, please indicate so in your personal statement in your application.
Applications for 2014-15 are DUE BY DECEMBER 3, 2013.
Any questions or concerns about the application process should be addressed to .
The purpose of the PhD Program in Immunology is to train graduate students to identify and solve current problems in the field of Immunology. Accordingly, the Immunology Program’s goals for our graduate students include the following:
- To acquire a fundamental and comprehensive body of knowledge and skills through an integrated curriculum for the tracks in molecular, cellular and translational immunology and computational and systems immunology.
- To identify important scientific questions and utilize experimental approaches that address these questions using the most appropriate methodology.
- To critically analyze current primary literature in the field of immunology and other fields relevant to their research focus.
- To organize and communicate research findings and ideas effectively to a variety of audiences.
- To prepare manuscripts that will be published in the leading journals.
- To develop teaching and mentoring skills.
Our graduate students will also:
- Develop skills for effective collaboration and networking.
- Gain perspective on how a scientific discipline operates academically, ethically, socially, and politically.
- Learn to function as independent immunologists who can confidently confront the challenges of intellectual work in the variety of professional opportunities available to students who have completed their PhD.
These skills constitute essential components of a PhD education. Students work closely with faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and other students to achieve these goals.
Computational and Systems Immunology
Our objective for the Computational and Systems Immunology track is to train a new generation of researchers in systems immunology who are adept at designing and applying computational and experimental approaches to important questions and problems in immunology. A successful computational and systems immunology approach will accelerate the application of developments in the field of immunology to the discovery of basic immunological mechanisms, functions, and structures, and the treatment of human diseases. Graduate students in systems immunology will be expected to combine all aspects of computational and classical immunological approaches. The emergence of high throughput (HTP) technologies that probe global molecular signals has spawned a systems engineering approach to immunology research that integrates experimental and computational methods in the synthesis and testing of new immunological hypotheses.
Our new program in Computational and Systems Immunology will emphasize the above principles with a focus on two broad areas. First, we will explore sophisticated computational approaches to HTP data analysis that discover molecular interactions and networks critical to immunological systems. Second, we will explore mathematical formulations of known or conjectured biological systems that enable computer simulation of cellular and molecular dynamics. Researchers in this field will be expected to derive biologically-relevant computational predictions that are subsequently experimentally validated. Researchers with strong backgrounds in immunology, statistics, mathematics, engineering, computer science, or related quantitative field are encouraged to apply.
