Your faculty adviser during the first year is Dr. Madhvi Venkatesh.
Orientation
The schedule for Orientation will be full-including welcomes, introductions, and the general administrative housekeeping necessary to start your time at Vanderbilt. We will begin orientation on Monday, August 17, 2026. All students are required to attend the orientation in its entirety. New students will also complete all the necessary safety training courses to work in a lab.
Academic Calendar
Please be aware that the IGP academic year may not mesh with the items listed for the Graduate School on the University calendar. Pay close attention to IGP rotation and course dates and deadlines when making travel plans.
Classes
The IGP Bioregulation I class will begin on Friday, August 21, but students will be fully booked beginning on the first day of orientation, August 17. You will be registered for your courses and the curriculum will be described in detail during Orientation.
The Bioregulation course is designed by the Interdisciplinary Graduate Pathway Executive Committee along with associated sub-committees for curriculum development. Each year, feedback is collected and the curriculum is updated to meet the educational needs of students. The course is based on the most recent literature in the subject fields of the sections of the course. This means that lectures and discussions are heavily dependent on recently-published journal articles.
Research Rotations
Students will perform four laboratory rotations over the course of their first year. Prior to each rotation start date, students must meet with faculty of interest and then rank their rotation choices in the Rotation portal. All students are required to identify an academic advisor who will direct their thesis project by the end of the second semester of the first academic year of graduate training. If a student has not identified an advisor by this time, the BRET office will support the student in conducting one or two additional rotations over the course of 4 weeks. If this proves to be unsuccessful, the student should arrange a meeting with the Senior Associate Dean at least one week before the end of the additional rotation(s) to consider options. Any student who is unable to find an academic advisor will be dismissed from Vanderbilt.
Academic Standing
The Graduate School policy is that a graduate student may be dismissed for not meeting academic standards in either of these ways:
- Students who fall below an average GPA of 3.0 are placed on probation for one semester. If the student’s performance does not improve during that semester, the student may be dismissed.
- The accumulation of three U and/or LP (Unsatisfactory and/or Low Pass) grades over the course of study can lead to dismissal.
Textbooks and Reference Materials
Textbooks serve as background and general reference material, but any required preparation materials (reading or video) will be available on the appropriate course website.
We have a few copies of each of the following books available for short-term check out in Dr. Venkatesh's office in MRBIII, Suite U3215. If you already have a different edition of one of these books, you are responsible for finding the corresponding chapter in your edition for any background reading the might be assigned. Online books are also acceptable, if available.
- Biochemistry, Voet and Voet, 4th ed.
- Genetics: From Genes to Genomes, Hartwell et al 6th ed.
- Molecular Biology of the Cell, Alberts et al. 6th ed.
- Membrane Structural Biology, Luckey, 2nd ed.
- Intuitive Biostatistics: A Nonmathematical guide to Statistical Thinking, Motulsky, 4th ed.
- Life and Research: A Survival Guide for Early-Career Biomedical Scientists, Grey and Oppenheimer, 1st ed.
Here are a few other optional resources that are freely available online:
Statistics
- Concepts and applications of inferential statistics (by Richard H. Lowry): http://vassarstats.net/textbook/
- Handbook of biological statistics (by John H. McDonald): http://www.biostathandbook.com/index.html
- A biologist’s guide to statistical thinking and analysis (by David Fay and Ken Gerow): http://www.wormbook.org/chapters/www_statisticalanalysis/statisticalanalysis.html
- Principles of statistics guide (by GraphPad Prism): https://www.graphpad.com/guides/prism/latest/statistics/stat_—_principles_of_statistics_-.htm
- Stats Q&A page with lots of great responses/interpretations: http://stats.stackexchange.com/questions
Python
- Digital Lab python lessons: https://heardlibrary.github.io/digital-scholarship/script/python/lessons/
- Python official documentation: https://docs.python.org/3/
- Scientific computing with python: https://www.freecodecamp.org/learn/scientific-computing-with-python/
Software
DO NOT start the free subscription until instructed to do so. If you do so now, the free 1 month trial won’t last!
- GraphPad Prism- we will sign up for a 1 month free subscription during the Biostats portion of Bioregulation. Many of the labs through which you rotate will likely have a subscription to Prism, but if not, you can use some of the free online tools available from Prism (http://www.graphpad.com/quickcalcs/)