Upstate/Downstate: Chemical biologists train in 'crown jewel' program of two-city collaboration
This is part of the fall series about collaborations between Cornell's Ithaca and Weill Cornell Medical College campuses
By Kate Becker
When the first-year graduate students in a training program in chemical biology stepped onto the Cornell campus for the first time in 2001, they didn't have the comfort of talking with veterans who had been through it all before.
That's because these eight students were the inaugural class of the Tri-Institutional Training Program in Chemical Biology (TPCB), an innovative collaboration between Cornell in Ithaca and Weill Cornell Medical College, Rockefeller University and the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City.
A branch of the institutions' multifaceted Tri-Institutional Research Program (TIRP), the TPCB aims to stimulate research at the interface between chemistry and biology. Founded with an anonymous $80 million gift in 2000, the TIRP also operates research programs in computational biology and cancer and developmental biology. A new graduate training program in computational biology, modeled on the TPCB, welcomed its first class this fall
Bruce Ganem, professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Cornell and head of the Ithaca arm of the TPCB, describes the training program in chemical biology as TIRP's "crown jewel."
That 2001 inaugural, he said, was "intrepid." The first year was "a huge experiment," said Ganem. "We were troubleshooting as we went."
Students and faculty, for example, had to master New York-to-Ithaca videoconferencing and learn to cut through multi-institutional red tape.
Two years later, those first students are comfortably ensconced in laboratories in New York and Ithaca, and this year's entering class is enjoying a much smoother ride.
Like previous classes, the nine students in the entering class of 2003 spent the summer doing laboratory rotations in New York City. There, they were immersed in medical research and got their fill of urban life before traveling to Cornell's Ithaca campus for a fall semester loaded with graduate-level chemistry courses.
TPCB students typically enter the program with impressive chemistry credentials (most studied chemistry as undergraduates, and all were admitted to the training program through Cornell's Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology). However, their backgrounds in biology are "a mixed bag," said Timothy Ryan, TPCB director and professor of biochemistry at Weill Cornell Medical College.
To put everyone on even footing, the TPCB faculty designed a class called Advanced Biomedical Sciences, held in New York City in the fall of the second year. The class consists of lectures by TPCB faculty and luminaries such as Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center president and Nobel laureate Harold Varmus.
"Being young, TPCB has been extraordinarily flexible," said third-year student Jane Xingjuan Chao. "The class was relatively informal, and we were able to have a lot of inspiring discussions with professors and to give suggestions about the class, too."
At the end of the course, said Ryan, students "know what the cutting-edge questions are," and are prepared to begin research at one of the four TIRP institutions. A graduating student receives a degree from the institution at which his or her thesis research is completed.
The research projects chosen by the 2001 entering class, the first to do research full time, illustrates the power of the TPCB to connect researchers who might otherwise never collaborate, said Ryan. He described third-year student Heather King as a "poster child" for this brand of academic matchmaking. King's interest in the circadian rhythm -- the internal clock responsible for everything from blood pressure regulation to jet lag -- brought together two prominent researchers who had never before collaborated.
One of them, Rockefeller University Professor Mike Young, studies the genetics of the circadian rhythm. Brian Crane, professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Cornell, studies its molecular basis.
"The student was the one who forged the link," said Ryan.
Originally published in the December 11, 2003 issue of Cornell Chronicle