NIH Training Grant in Molecular and Cellular Endocrinology

Training Areas

The Graduate School of Biological Sciences at Mount Sinai School of Medicine was established in 1968, when the School of Medicine was chartered. At that time, the first group of graduate students was accepted together with the first group of medical students. The Graduate School administers a Ph.D. program, termed the Biomedical Sciences Doctoral Program. The Graduate School also administers the Medical Scientist Training Program (MSTP) that integrates M.D. training in the School of Medicine with Ph.D. training in a program that awards both an M.D. and Ph.D. degree. Mount Sinai provides the major proportion of intramural fellowship support and offers a full range of graduate courses on its own campus, including all required and many elective courses.

Predoctoral Training

The Graduate School has now been organized within a framework of six multidisciplinary training areas that serve as the umbrellas for programs such as Endocrinology. This structure has replaced a mix of a few such multidisciplinary clusters that heretofore existed alongside a larger number of smaller, departmentally-based programs. Training in Endocrinology and Metabolism now takes place within a new Mechanisms of Disease and Therapy training area which is also the home of other disease and systems physiology-oriented programs including pathobiology, systems physiology and systemic aspects of signal transduction, pharmacology and therapeutics, immunobiology, infectious diseases, and gene therapy. The five other multidisciplinary training areas are: Biophysics, Structural and Biomathematical Biology; Genetics and Genomics; Molecular, Cellular, Biochemical and Developmental Sciences; Microbiology; and Neurosciences. Graduates students receive their Ph.D. degrees in Biomedical Sciences regardless of the multidisciplinary training area chosen. The highly interactive and cooperative structure of the multidisciplinary training areas that is fostered by that common degree, the modular structure of many of the advanced courses, and the extensive collaborations among our faculty, all enable our students to enjoy highly individualized training. As will be discussed in detail below, the participation of our Endocrinology students in the larger Mechanisms of Disease and Therapy training framework gives them a broad exposure to mechanisms of disease and therapeutics that is invaluable for their development.

In addition to about 500 medical students in the M.D. program, there are currently 179 students in the doctoral program, of which 50 are M.D./Ph.D. (MSTP) students. Each year, about 30 students enter the Ph.D. program and about 9 students enter the M.D./Ph.D. program.

Postdoctoral Training

A large number of post-doctoral trainees are presently on campus at Mount Sinai School of Medicine. Trainees have individual arrangements with their preceptors and their length of training varies between two-to-five years. However, most postdoctoral positions are not institutionally supported and, in most cases, are part of Federal and non-Federal research funding. The contribution of the training program faculty to the education of their own and shared pre- and postdoctoral research trainees is evidence of the extent an ongoing effort. In addition, the presence of cellular and molecular endocrinology within the Mount Sinai community is now of such strength that postdoctoral fellows are exposed to high quality lectures and seminars in the endocrine sciences throughout their training period in addition to their supervised laboratory research. We also know that many past trainees from Mount Sinai School of Medicine are now directing independent endocrine research programs throughout the world as evidence of our past success.

Clinical Endocrinology Training

The present Endocrinology Fellowship Program is a two-year program with four positions in each year. First-year trainees are exposed to a variety of clinical endocrine situations with three-month rotations in diabetes, nutrition, general endocrinology at The Mount Sinai Hospital and the James J. Peters VA Medical Center campus. The second year of the fellowship is devoted to research with a chosen preceptor while maintaining a minimum of clinical ambulatory care commitments. Appropriate trainees may take the opportunity of a third year of the fellowship in our Training Grant mechanism. The clinical Division of Endocrinology, Diabetes and Bone Disease has 12 full-time investigators in addition to 25 voluntary attending physicians. All endocrine laboratory testing for the Mount Sinai community is performed within the Clinical Endocrinology laboratories which are directed and advised by Division faculty. The clinical and science conferences and seminars of the Division complement the training of laboratory scientists.