Professional Development

The Advanced Developmental Training Initiative supports a substantial part of travel within the country (and possibly internationally) for the following purposes:

1. to attend short courses/training that are high caliber (example: Cold Spring Harbor Course series)
2. to attend conferences that are equivalent to e.g., Gordon Conferences (i.e., targeting frontier research and its application in specific areas)
3. to visit national laboratories of international eminence that are conducting leading/cutting-edge research (e.g., Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, NIH Institutes, etc.) and obtain training in specific techniques from which the incumbent and the mentor’s laboratory can substantially benefit

The initiative supports other similar possibilities but will NOT support travel for “routine” conferences for poster/oral presentations.

The goal of this funding is to encourage graduate students to:

1. attend high-end courses, training, and conferences that have the potential to substantially enhance their learning/knowledge,
2. gain experience in laboratories outside the mentor’s lab to learn novel techniques that will considerably augment their thesis research, add a new dimension to the mentor’s laboratory (e.g., expertise in new technologies), and gain perspective and learning/research experience in a laboratory outside the mentor’s lab.

This VMBS Graduate Student Core Facility Experiential Learning Program seeks to enhance experience with research applications that utilize both equipment and expertise of the Texas A&M AgriLife Research Genomics and Bioinformatics Laboratory and/or VMBS Image Analysis Laboratory. This program provides user fees for utilization of these core facilities.

Core facility leadership will provide trainees with mentored assistance to develop a scope of work that integrates experimental design, instrument/application training, and data analysis. Proposal requests can be up to $2,500 for the Texas A&M AgriLife Genomics and Bioinformatics service and up to $1,000 for VMBS Image Analysis Laboratory services.

These research grants provide $5,000 to each trainee and are evaluated through a competitive process. The proposals will be reviewed by an experienced committee of reviewers that will only recommend funding of proposals that show strong potential to compete for funding at the state or national level. The proposals must target emerging research areas in clinical and applied/basic sciences, and current research priorities within various funding agencies.

The grant will serve as seed money to generate preliminary data and is an incentive to aggressively prepare and submit proposals to various extramural federal and state agencies and foundations/associations. While graduate students will be working very closely with their mentors in the preparation of the proposal for this RFP, if successful in obtaining the VMBS grant, interaction with the faculty advisors of the Graduate Student Association and other highly experienced and successful PIs within the college during the next phase of submissions is strongly encouraged.

Information about the GSA Travel Awards can be found at the Graduate Student Association (GSA) website.