Biomedical Graduate Programs to Consider: Pharmacology
Cynthia Warrick, PhD RPh
Now that I’ve explained the current challenges for admissions into Medical and Health Professions schools, I want to share information about biomedical graduate programs that you probably haven’t thought about but could be great health career choices. Biomedical doctoral programs leading to the PhD (Doctor of Philosophy) in a particular discipline are especially attractive because the best programs cover tuition and provide a stipend, with opportunities to serve as a graduate research assistant (GRA) or graduate teaching assistant (GTA), which provide additional funding for teaching undergraduate students in related disciplines, and working on funded research projects (both in laboratories and in communities). Biomedical doctoral graduates have much less debt post-grad than health professions programs, and the National Institutes of Health has a loan repayment program (LRP) for biomedical PhDs who conduct research after they complete their PhD. Even if you don’t have debt for the PhD, the NIH LRP can cover student loan debt from undergraduate and masters’ programs.
The process for choosing a biomedical graduate program and building a competitive application is a little different from health professions admissions like medicine, dentistry, veterinary medicine, etc. Identifying a research advisor/mentor is very important to ensure that you develop a research focus in an area of your passion, and that person is supportive of your development, and that you get along with. PhD advisors are mentors who become colleagues in the field and serve as initial research collaborators; they facilitate your path through the doctoral process and help newly minted PhDs get their research published and funded, which is critical to success in the Academy, Government, and Industry.
The first step in finding a research mentor is thinking about topic areas of interest to you. Do you want to discover a cure for pancreatic cancer? How about a device to detect the early onset of Alzheimer’s disease? Or a new process for weight management following bariatric surgery or the use of GLP-1 drugs? I’ve noticed that undergraduates settle on careers and specialties through someone in their family or who they know: through exposure. Because of a student’s age and exposure, this method of choosing a career limits the set of choices when the only physician they’ve seen is a pediatrician or nurse practitioner, and the only instructor has been high school biology. Health Careers high schools do a good job of exposing students to biomedical careers, but these specialized high schools are not accessible to students in smaller cities and rural areas.
Identifying PhD programs that have NIH-funded training grants is a plus, because an applicant could be eligible for a funded fellowship that includes tuition, research training, salary, and benefits. The NIH RePORTER is a valuable resource to search for training grants. https://reporter.nih.gov/advanced-search Using the Advanced Projects Search, you can limit the search by city, state, organization, and department type. Under Activity Code, select Training Grants.
Let’s look at a graduate area of focus: Pharmacology; the study of the effects of drugs and chemicals on living organisms. It is interdisciplinary and builds on the strengths of physiology, biochemistry, cell biology, neuroscience, and molecular biology. In pharmacology, faculty and students use drugs and chemicals as tools, to probe the molecular makeup of living systems to understand how cellular and organ systems function and are regulated. Graduates earning PhDs in pharmacology have numerous career opportunities in: Academic Health Professions Schools (Faculty positions in Medicine, Pharmacy, Nursing), Research Centers, Government agencies, and in pharmaceutical and biotech industries. A search today in HigherEdJobs.com resulted in more than 400 job listings ranging from Postdoctoral scholars, Academic research scientist, Assistant/Associate/Full Professor, across 41 states.
When I searched the NIH Reporter for Training Grants in Pharmacology: 84 projects were found across approximately 40 institutions and 24 states. Through the research for this article, I learned about a Pharmacology graduate program that came as a surprise to me. The doctoral program in Pharmacology & Physiology at Georgetown University has been training PhD students for 89 years, and students are eligible for this graduate fellowship to support students from historically under-represented groups in science for 5 years. The Patrick Healy Graduate Fellowship is named in honor of Georgetown University’s 28th President, who was the first African American President of Georgetown (1874 – 1882). Rev. Dr. Patrick Healy was born in slavery, but “passed” as white. He is celebrated as the first American of African ancestry to earn a PhD but would have rejected this identity. The Jesuits knew Healy had been born Black but ignored it because he was first in his class at Holy Cross, and they could not overlook his merit. During his tenure as President, Healy transformed Georgetown into a world-class university. He expanded the undergraduate curriculum, strengthened the sciences, and raised the standards of its medical and law schools. Since the department’s founding in 1935, it has trained over 180 alumni in pharmacology and physiology.
Biomedical science graduate programs, like pharmacology, are alternative pathways for students interested in medicine and health careers. Research-based programs leading to the PhD are important opportunities to develop future faculty in the sciences and biomedical researchers for higher education.