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Graduate School and M.D./Ph.D. Growth Brings Challenges

More students accepting offers of admission produce a 'problem any school would want to have’

 

The increasing popularity of The University of Texas Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences at Houston (GSBS) means more applicants, and more applicants mean new challenges for George M. Stancel, Ph.D., GSBS dean, and Dianna M. Milewicz, M.D., Ph.D., director of the M.D./Ph.D. program.

“This is the kind of problem any school or program would want to have,” Stancel said. Student acceptances to GSBS went from 38 percent for 2002-2004 to 54 percent in 2005. The increase meant there were 20 incoming students in the Ph.D. program who did not have financial support.

“Fortunately, the school had enough in reserves to cover the current school year,” said Stancel, who is the John P. McGovern Professor of Biomedical Sciences. He is working with Jerre Iversen, vice president for development, to significantly increase philanthropic fund support both in the short term and over the next five years.

Also, acceptances doubled for the M.D./Ph.D. Program, a partnership among GSBS, the UT Medical School at Houston, and the UT M. D. Anderson Cancer Center. Letters were sent out to fill five slots, and 10 accepted. Fortunately, the Medical School and M. D. Anderson were able to provide funding for the additional slots this year so that the commitments could be honored.

“The program is becoming more attractive and popular because of its flexibility and numerous lab choices,” said Milewicz, director of the medical genetics program at the Medical School. She holds the President George Bush Chair in Cardiovascular Medicine and is the Doris Duke Distinguished Clinical Scientist.

GSBS master’s, Ph.D. and M.D./Ph.D. students work in labs at the Medical School, the Brown Foundation Institute of Molecular Medicine for the Prevention of Human Diseases, M. D. Anderson, and the Texas A&M University Institute of Biosciences and Technology (TAMU’s IBT).

Stancel believes the primary reason for GSBS growth is the promotion of the research and outreach programs of the parent institutions, the UT Health Science Center and M. D. Anderson Cancer Center.

Second is the team approach that Stancel and the faculty take in marketing GSBS to colleges and universities in Texas and other states. Regularly, presentations are given on campuses in the Texas A&M and UT systems, University of Houston, Rice University, Texas Southern University, Prairie View A&M and many liberal arts colleges. Stancel increased the number and the frequency of such visits when he became dean six years ago.

“Each assistant dean is assigned faculty to cultivate at particular schools. Each year those faculty receive a GSBS brochure and a personal letter,” said Stancel, who came to the UT campus in 1972 and joined the GSBS faculty the next year.

Created in 1963, GSBS has some 1,400 graduates, but the school did not have an alumni association until Stancel became dean. He sends letters to the alumni, asking each to keep an eye out for young men and women who would be good prospects for GSBS and to direct them to the Web site.

“GSBS is faculty-run,” he said. “Not only do students choose this school based on individual scientists, but it is the faculty that define changes in the programs. The faculty draws from the UT Health Science Center schools, M. D. Anderson and the TAMU’s IBT. The collective knowledge of this group is another reason for success, and about every four to five years a new program is added to the curriculum.

“Right now, there is a faculty group brainstorming about developing a program on structural biology. At the UT Health Science Center or M.D. Anderson, there are many individuals working on the structures of proteins such as drug receptors. But there is no organized GSBS program that determines the structure of molecules such as those involved in drug actions. This approach would provide a clear picture of a drug receptor and then design the specific drug to interact with that receptor,” he said. In five to 10 years, the best students will be looking for opportunities like this. Also, other universities, drug companies and the National Institutes of Health will want to hire scientists trained in this area.

“Medicine and biology are not static,” he emphasized. “You have to stay ahead of the curve to be competitive for grants, students and faculty. What we have done differently is to recruit faculty who are on the leading edge of each of the disciplines.”

The M.D./Ph.D. program, which began in 1982, is different from any others in the U.S. because most of its students do three years of medical school before going into the laboratory. After completion of their graduate work, they return to finish the fourth year of medical school. The objective is for the students to experience seeing patients, the disease process, recovery, sometimes death and what it feels like to be a doctor before going into the lab.

“The main advantage of this fexible M.D./Ph.D. program is the flexibility of doing research after seeing patients in the third year of medical school,” said Christopher Wilson, 26, of Wyoming, who is in his fifth year of the program. “This allowed me to get a strong clinical perspective for approaching my basic science research.” Winner of the 2006 Harry S. and Isabel C. Cameron Foundation Fellowship for his research in obesity and cardiovascular disease, he has seven publications.

Amir Mohsenin, 29, a graduate from the University of Pennsylvania, is in his sixth year of an eight-year program. “This program develops in the student the ability to look at medicine not only from the clinical perspective, but also from a molecular and disease-based standpoint. One goal of medical research is to understand what drives disease,” said Mohsenin, who won the 2005 Research Day Poster Contest explaining the role of adenosine and angiogenesis in chronic lung disease. He also has seven publications.

Physician-scientist graduates have been successful in landing positions on the faculty of UT and M. D. Anderson, along with numerous other institutions, another boost to the reputations of GSBS and the M.D./Ph.D. program. Among the M.D./Ph.D. alumni are Timothy Boone, professor and chairman of urology at Baylor College of Medicine; Kimberly Dunn, assistant professor and associate dean of the UT School of Health Information Sciences at Houston; Filemon Tan, assistant professor at the UT Medical School at Houston; and Laura Wood, Russell Broaddus and Jonathan Trent, all assistant professors at M. D. Anderson Cancer Center.

By Nora K. Shire