In March, I announced the launch of a strategic planning process focused on training and career development. I encourage all stakeholders, including faculty members, postdocs, graduate students, university administrators and government and industry scientists to provide input on this important topic.
One easy way to make your voice heard is through our online form (no longer available). We list several questions that you can respond to anonymously. You don’t have to respond to every question, and you can also make other comments or recommendations.
If you have not yet shared your views, there’s still time—the Web site closes April 21.
I think that NIGMS could and should make a more deliberate effort to fund training grants that specifically recruit students with physics, computer science, math and engineering degrees. Such programs, housed in life-sciences and biomedical graduate programs/departments, are best equipped to teach them biology and wet-bench science. Most importantly, fully integrating such students into biology departments will help train the next generation of computationally literate biomedical scientists and help close the “language” gap that currently exists between NIGMS funded scientists and computational biologists. NIGMS should have (more) RFAs specifically targeted for such training grants.