Leading the Way: Student Engagement and Nationally Competitive Awards

4. The National Institutes of Health/Oxford/Cambridge Scholars Program: A New Approach to Biomedical PhD Training

4 The National Institutes of Health/Oxford/ Cambridge Scholars Program A NewApproach to Biomedical PhDTraining MICHAEL J. LENARDO Michael Lenardo graduated with a BA from Johns Hopkins University and an MD from Washington University in St. Louis. He performed clinical work in internal medicine and research at the University of Iowa and received postdoctoral training at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research at MIT with Nobel laureates David Baltimore and Philip Sharp. He established an independent research unit at the Laboratory of Immunology at the NIH in 1989 and became a senior investigator and section head in 1994. Dr. Lenardo serves on several editorial boards and has given numerous lectures around the world on his work on the molecular regulation of immune homeostasis. His work focuses on lymphocyte apoptosis, autoimmunity, and HIV pathogenesis. Along with Professor Sir John Bell and Professor Sir Andrew McMichael (both at Oxford University), he developed the NIH-Oxford Program in 2001. He then worked with Sir Keith Peters to establish the NIH-Cambridge Program in 2002. 33 In 1999 the National Institutes of Health (NIH) began an exciting experiment in biomedical research education.1 Professors Harold Varmus and Michael Gottesman established the NIH Graduate Partnerships Program (GPP), which opened the intramural laboratories of the NIH to doctoral trainees. The GPP was designed to create a graduate student community by forging university partnerships for the training of doctoral bioscience students. The NIH has both an extramural division (approximately 90 percent of NIH resources are dispensed as grants to research institutes and universities) and an intramural division (approximately 10 percent of NIH resources support its in-house laboratories). The NIH intramural program, which includes the GPP, comprises over 1,500 research groups spanning the full spectrum of biomedical research. It is the largest medical science research enterprise in the world and is housed in Bethesda, Maryland, and several satellite campuses. The organizational structure of the GPP is similar to that of a university , with the GPP director serving as the equivalent of a dean by overseeing various academic programs focused in thematic areas of research. The GPP sponsors graduate-student retreats, student research days, a graduatestudent council, and other programs that foster an academic environment similar to that found at a university. These activities promote student interaction, help students solve problems during their training, and create an interactive graduate-student community on the NIH campus. For the GPP vision to become reality, NIH leaders forged partnerships with outstanding university partners, work that involved both challenge and opportunity. The challenge involved building programs that would be regarded as “win-win” situations for university partners and NIH. Since its creation in the late 1930s, the Bethesda campus of NIH has been a haven for advanced trainees, including postdoctoral fellows, clinical fellows, and other professional scientists. Nevertheless, a 1999 survey conducted during the GPP planning process found that over 150 trainees had established ad hoc agreements with NIH faculty members to carry out all or part of their doctoral graduate work on campus. Thus a sizable population of doctoral trainees was already at NIH. In addition, in the mid-1990s intramural NIH created the postbaccalaureate (“postbac”) program. This enabled students finishing bachelor’s degrees to carry out full-time research at NIH for one or two years. The postbac program did not grant degrees, but it enabled students to burnish their 34 • Michael J. Lenardo scientific skills for future training in graduate or medical school. In effect the postbac program created a direct demand for a pathway that would allow students to earn a doctorate by continuing their NIH work. With these favorable antecedents for a formal graduate training program already in place by the end of the 1990s, the creation of the GPP seemed a logical next step. The first new partnership launched by NIH was the NIH-Oxford Program in 2001. This partnership was launched by Professor John Bell and Professor Andrew McMichael at the University of Oxford and me. The following year the partnership was extended with the help of Professor Sir Keith Peters to include the University of Cambridge. Both partnerships came to be managed together as the NIH/Oxford/ Cambridge Scholars Program. Foremost in our minds was how to create an attractive program—attractive to the universities and their faculties, attractive to top-quality students, and attractive to the intramural scientists and leadership of NIH. We also had a strong motivation, given...