I. MMoD Core
BIOC 992k: Graduate Seminar
Seminar students present one journal club topic per year (years 1-3 of the program) in an area of broad interest to an interdisciplinary audience. Peer review committees, each consisting of students at different levels in their programs, evaluate the presentation in a short discussion with the presenter and the course director. Each student (years 2-4 of their program) is also required to present once per year on their individual research project.
BIOC 998: Tour of Industry and Medicine
This course is designed to provide early and ongoing opportunities for all MMoD students to be exposed to health and disease related topics in the clinic and in an industry setting. To address the industry component, we have developed an agreement with regional biomedical industries to host a full-day tour and workshop on-site for first-year MMoD students. The objective is to expose students to the private sector concerns of product development, industry preparedness, entrepreneurship and innovation, and offer them expert training in building their curriculum vitae to be competitive for private sector employment at the PhD level. For the clinical topics component of this course, the MMoD sponsors one externally invited clinical research speaker per semester in the CBC weekly seminar series (Tuesdays). MMoD students will participate in a two-hour journal club workshop led either by the faculty host or by a senior graduate student in the host lab, in which teams of junior and senior trainees select key journal articles for the discussion that are centered on the speaker's research theme. All MMoD students will receive ongoing instruction in clinical health and disease research areas by participating in these workshops throughout their program.
BIOC 935: Metabolic Function and Dysfunction
The course is exclusively based in the primary literature on metabolism, featuring the current year's research to examine overall pathways and principles of intermediary metabolism and how they are altered or uniquely adapted in pathological conditions such as obesity, diabetes, and cancer. Discussion and critical interpretation are solidified, and hypothesis construction and experimental testing are developed. The course assessment is focused on proposal writing and peer critique. Students meet four proposal deadlines: the first is a two-page specific aims outline, which is revised and integrated into a three- to four- investigator program project for the second proposal; the third is an individual proposal, which is revised for the final deadline to be in the style of an NIH predoctoral F31 proposal. Following each submission, students are assigned two proposals and use the NIH critique template to provide a written critique, which is then discussed in a mock review panel format. Revisions are discussed in the following class period in small groups guided by the instructor, with the proposal author and reviewers working together to strengthen each other's proposals. Students develop critical skills in team science approaches, grantsmanship, giving and receiving constructive professional criticism, and the presentation and defense of a hypothesis.