Overview & Administration

Once the incoming first-year CBI Fellows are notified of their acceptance into the CBI Program, usually mid-April, and they accept UD and CBI, they are invited to the upcoming summer CBI schedule and events. Fall Orientation for Year 1 Fellows is held after they arrive on campus, in late August.

Next, the CBI Executive Committee reviews the applications of mostly Year 2 PhD students, and makes these decisions of acceptance at the end of May, early June. Funding for the Year 2 students will be covered by the NIH grant and will start on September 1, or whenever their current funding ends. There are forms that need to be completed for the funding to commence, so CBI holds an Orientation for these new CBI Fellows in early September.

The CBI program, through the role played by the Program Director, its faculty, other CBI trainees and CBI alumni add significantly to the mentoring of each student. We have had success in the Program Director leading a RCR training session on “Mentoring”. These sessions have served the dual purpose of providing an important RCR topic while simultaneously highlighting the mentoring that each CBI trainee should receive from PhD mentors, PhD committee members, CBI faculty and senior CBI trainees. We will continue to offer this session as part of the CBI orientation program. Students admitted in the 2nd year have previously selected a CBI mentor. Naturally, the PhD mentor becomes the most significant mentor, however the Program Director continues to serve a significant supporting role, mentoring the CBI trainee throughout the duration of their graduate career.

The heart of the CBI program centers around the weekly meetings and seminars which provide opportunities for students to present and critically evaluate research from multiple disciplines.  Students also get to interact with invited speakers from around the country and learn about cutting edge research from faculty and fellow students.  These experiences are supplemented by career workshops, travel opportunities, and symposia involving regional CBI programs.

Our CBI program will provide a diverse multidisciplinary training experience while providing a well-grounded education in core disciplines. We believe that it is essential for trainees to feel enabled and not restricted by being a CBI trainee. To serve as a rough guide for both the trainees and mentors, we expect each student to have experience through courses or rotations in each of four hierarchical scales of biomolecular complexity; atomistic, macromolecular, multi-molecular and cellular systems. This plan provides substantial flexibility to the trainee while insuring that CBI trainees are conversant in the language of both chemistry and biology. For clarity, an example of atomistic science might be a course in mechanistic enzymology, a rotation in a synthetic lab or investigating the consequences of a site-directed mutant. On the other end of the scale, cellular systems could include in vivo studies (E. coli, yeast, drosophila, mice, etc.) or tissue culture. The model that works very successfully for the our CBI program is one in which the Program Director works with each student, their respective director of graduate studies and if applicable current research advisor to customize a personalized curriculum that meets the objectives of the training grant, the needs of the student and the degree requirements for the individual doctoral programs. Students are however, united by a few select required courses: CBI Experience (CHEM606), a chemical biology course and a statistics class. To ensure rigor and reproducibility in their research, students can choose either STAT656: Biostatistics, CHEG841: Fundamentals of Probability and Statistics, or BISC643: Biological Data Analysis. Students should enroll in one of two core chemical biology courses: CHEM636: Bioorganic Chemistry and Chemical Biology or MSEG667: Macromolecular Design and Bioconjugations. These core classes will arm students with knowledge at the interface, which will help them think creatively during their graduate studies.

Students entering the program, as Y-2s will enroll in CHEM606 during the fall semester of their 2nd year; this will be their 1st year in the CBI program. Trainees will have already selected a laboratory of a CBI trainer, which might eliminate the need for additional rotations. Trainees will work closely with the Program Director and their faculty mentor to determine if an additional rotation outside their expertise would strengthen their PhD project at the interface of chemistry and biology. Each CBI trainee continues to actively participate by registering for CHEM606, presenting to the community as they advance through their graduate studies, and in that sense are officially enrolled in the “CBI Experience” throughout their graduate career. Additionally, these advanced students will continue to benefit from receiving feedback and ideas to broaden and tune their research. This holistic “CBI Experience” serves to unite our student community. It is noteworthy, that this commitment made by incoming trainees has been upheld consistently, and it has cumulatively had a major impact on their training as well as building a vibrant community in the CBI program. The enrichment opportunities afforded by each student’s continued active participation in the CBI Experience include: giving research updates to the CBI community, attending other student’s updates and actively participating in scientific discussions, hearing about research and meeting outside speakers from industry and academics (including alumni CBI presenters), career development workshops, reproducibility workshop in the January term and RCR sessions, as well as serving as peer mentors.