Lorena Infante Lara
The School of Medicine’s umbrella Ph.D. programs, the Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Biological and Biomedical Sciences and the Quantitative and Chemical Biology program, recruited 67 and 19 incoming graduate students, respectively. The new students will arrive on campus in August to begin the 2021-2022 academic cycle.
The QCB seized upon the opportunities presented by video platforms such as Zoom and created space and time for the interviewees to dive into the QCB, Vanderbilt, and Nashville culture. Although recruits could not experience Nashville’s music scene in person, local artists such as JD McPherson and Amythyst Kiah performed during the virtual dinners.
Beyond the recruiting weekends, the QCB created an “Explore the QCB” weekly series where recruits dove into specific parts of training at Vanderbilt every Wednesday night. Program leadership and current QCB students participated in honest discussions to help the recruits overcome the limitations of not attending in-person interviews, and were key to the success of the recruitment season.
The IGP also held virtual recruiting days. It welcomed 194 candidates who were interviewed by faculty over 775 times. Amongst the new class of IGPers are seven international scientists from China, India, Peru, and Nigeria. The incoming IGP graduate students hail from 57 different undergraduate institutions.
From among the incoming IGP/QCB cohort, 20 students were invited to be a part of the Initiative to Maximize Student Diversity. The IMSD is designed to provide students from underrepresented backgrounds in science not only a supportive community of peers, but also the opportunity to network with IMSD alumni and other successful historically underrepresented role models in science and to develop and hone a variety of academic skills.