The scientific advances that led to the sequencing of the human genome underscore the necessity to combine the scholarly approaches derived from classical fields such as genetics with those rapidly developing fields in the arena of genomics. Indeed, the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) have identified a national need to develop institutional training programs in the scientific disciplines at the interface of biological and genomic sciences. The ultimate objective of these efforts is to train scientists to take full advantage of the publicly available genomic data to make rapid and ingenious advances in biomedical research. Bringing these combined approaches to the practice of modern science and medicine will have an enormous impact on shaping the development of new fields, but before this can occur, the specialized disciplines need to be introduced into a framework in which they are juxtaposed. Scientists with expertise in genetic methods, molecular problems, and computational approaches must interact in productive ways and train a new generation of scientists to utilize cross-disciplinary tools in scientific research.
The creation of a graduate program in the Department of Genetics and Genomics aims to bring scientists in these fields together in an atmosphere of intellectual endeavor. The program is designed to catalyze collaborations among faculty members with seemingly disparate research interests and allow students to take part in this multidisciplinary discovery. These compound approaches will be standard methodology in the future, and it is our goal to train our students to utilize these methods to think broadly about scientific problems. We will teach our students to apply the approaches of classical genetics and modern genomics to investigations of the heritable basis of numerous biological traits, the relationships among genes, the regulation of their expression, and the molecular basis of genetic diseases. We encourage you to use this web site to further explore the details of our Graduate Program in Genetics and Genomics. If you should have any additional questions, please feel free to contact:
Shoumita
Dasgupta
Assistant Professor and Director of Graduate Studies
Department of Genetics and Genomics
715 Albany Street, E-628
Boston, MA 02118
(617) 414-1580
dasgupta@bu.edu
