Integrated Training in Pharmacological Sciences

The Predoctoral Integrated Training Program in Pharmacological Sciences aims to provide rigorous interdisciplinary predoctoral training in the fundamental mechanisms that control physiological and pathophysiological processes and drug action. Our goal is to provide educational activities and research training that connect the basic mechanistic findings to therapeutic modalities, including the identification of drug targets and development of lead therapeutic compounds.

Program Overview

Our training program offers in-depth training coupled with a broad perspective that enables students to incorporate emerging new areas throughout their careers. We seek to create a learning environment that promotes independent thinking and individual analytical skills, while fostering your ability to work in collaborative learning and research environments. Our program teaches a core of integrated didactic training in biophysics and systems pharmacology, which provides a grounding in core principles of biochemistry, structural biology, genetics and cellular and molecular biology, within a context of physiology and disease pathophysiology. We introduce computational and modeling approaches to systems problems at various scales, including large data sets and epidemiological problems, together with support that enables students with different entering levels of quantitative skills to succeed.

Our curriculum uses an integrated active learning approach both to basic and advanced courses and is enhanced by educational features that prepare students for many aspects of their future careers, such as peer evaluation and diverse presentation formats. The research projects allow you to tackle important problems in diverse areas of biomedicine that have strong pharmacological and/or systems biology interfaces and translational potential.

The interdisciplinary and translational training environment and the structure of the program foster the entry of our trainees into independent scientific careers. Our program has recruited outstanding students who were attracted to Mount Sinai because of its excellence and expanding opportunities for cutting-edge interactions across traditional disciplines, our strong mentoring environment, and our commitment to student training. The program is supported by a training grant from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (T32 GM062754).

We seek predoctoral students that we can support by the Integrated Training Program in Pharmacological Sciences. We show strong preference for students who are either in, or who will be joining, Pharmacology and Therapeutics Discovery Training Area (MTA). We consider assisting students in other MTAs if their research project is closely related to drug development, drug action, mechanisms of disease, or systems pharmacology. We also prefer to help students who are in the early years of the PhD program, or the early research years of the MD/PhD program.

We seek students who are eligible for support by NIH training grants and who are U.S. citizens or permanent residents of the United States. This grant assists seven trainees at a time, and we can help each student for two years.

Our personalized curriculum provides rigorous training at the junction of computation and experimentation.