The Integrated Biomedical Science Graduate Program at the University of South Carolina

Graduate students participating in doctoral (PhD) education programs constitute the principal workforce in the biomedical research activities conducted in most research universities and medical schools in the United States. As faculty take on more academic responsibilities, they rely on graduate students to carry out much of the hands-on laboratory work that leads to the generation of knowledge in the form of published papers. The work of graduate students also leads to the generation of further federal, industrial and foundation grants to support research. These grants, through the provision of overhead funds, are nowadays supporting more and more of the mission of medical schools and universities. A strong graduate program attracts the best students who do the best research and, as a result, generate more research papers and grants. The whole university benefits from strong graduate programs in the biomedical sciences because, currently, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) are the leading federal source of research funding. As the number of grants and students in a university program increase, it becomes possible for the university to obtain separate funding to support graduate students in the form of stipends from training grants from the NIH and also from private organizations such as the Howard Hughes Foundation. In many major universities, such training grants support the majority of graduate students in the biomedical sciences. They also provide support for post-doctoral fellows. The University of South Carolina (USC), unfortunately, has had little success in obtaining training grants from the NIH because of a lack of a critical mass of faculty and existing graduate students in many of its colleges. There has also been a lack of well qualified applicants to many biomedical research graduate programs at USC. It is a fact of academic life that a strong graduate program generates money that often leads to an even stronger program. It has been evident for many years that a stronger biomedical sciences graduate program is needed so that the university may compete nationally, not only for funds to support its biomedical graduate programs but also for research grants and contracts.