In the September issue of Nature Chemical Biology, John Silvius wrote about McGill University’s interdepartmental graduate program in chemical biology, which was established in 2002 and now has “roughly 30 graduate students, 10 postdoctoral fellows and 30 ”https://www.mcgill.ca/biochemistry/chemicalbiology/mentors/“>faculty mentors.”
The program involves scientists from the Department of Biochemistry, the Department of Chemistry, and the Department of Pharmacology and Therapeutics, and a “key objective of the program is to maximize opportunities for students with chemistry and life science backgrounds to share and appreciate their sometimes distinct perspectives on the field of chemical biology.” Silvius wrote that this is accomplished via seminar discussion meetings, workshops, and an “annual research symposium at which students present their work to other students and faculty mentors.”
There are other interdepartmental and multi-institutional graduate programs in chemical biology: for example, there is the Cornell/Rockefeller/Sloan-Kettering Tri-Institutional Training Program in Chemical Biology in New York City (which involves Cornell University, The Rockefeller University, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, and the Weill Medical College of Cornell). Graduate students in the Tri-Institutional Training Program can rotate in (and join) laboratories at any of the institutions and they do not have to teach classes, “”https://www.triiprograms.org/tpcb/course_of_study.html">enabling them to take an accelerated course schedule (four courses per semester during the first year)." (Although I understand that the program was designed so the students could take a large number of classes, I really enjoyed teaching during graduate school and think it’s an important experience for all graduate students. But I’ll save that topic for another blog post…)
There’s obviously more than one way to train the next generation of chemical biologists, but Silvius believes that
An effective training program in chemical biology must produce graduates who have a distinct sense of intellectual identity yet can work effectively with researchers that are more conventionally trained either in chemistry or in the life sciences alone… Moreover, by promoting constant intermixing of individuals trained in the cultures of chemistry and biology, such a program allows students to be participants in the very type of stimulating, creative ferment that drives the field of chemical biology itself.
If you are a graduate student in (or a recent graduate of) an interdepartmental or multi-institutional graduate program in chemical biology, I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts about your program/your experiences. Why did you choose an interdepartmental or multi-institutional graduate program, instead of a Department of Chemistry & Chemical Biology? (And for those of you who did their graduate work in a Department of Chemistry & Chemical Biology, why didn’t you choose an interdepartmental or multi-institutional graduate program?) For those of you working on the interface of other disciplines (for example, biophysics, chemical physics, bionanotechnology, etc.) did your graduate program meet your (scientific) needs/expectations? If not, what could they have done to make it easier for you to pursue interdisciplinary research?
Joshua
Joshua Finkelstein (Associate Editor, Nature)
One thing that never seems to be get mentioned in the discussion about training chemical biologists is the eventual employment of these students.
I graduated from a chemical biology training program at a prestigious institution, but my ongoing experience has been that hiring in both academia and industry is still dominated by traditional discipline boundaries. Or, in other words, it’s far easier to train exclusively as an organic chemist or as a molecular biologist, start a career in one field, then branch off to the other, than try to acquire the skills of both as a graduate student.
People in my program who have been successful have done so by representing themselves consistently as one extreme or the other (i.e. organic chemists or molecular biologists) to potential employers or grant agencies; those who have tried to market themselves as ‘chemical biologists’ have had extreme difficulty finding jobs or getting their proposals funded.
Although in industry there is a call for medicinal chemists to understand biochemistry and molecular biology, this does not reflect hiring practices, which are generally focused on hiring the best organic synthesis talent possible, and then training them in enough biology to do their jobs.
There is little, if any focus in industry on having molecular biologists who understand chemistry.
Small startup biotechs may be the exception to that rule, as they look for people who can wear multiple hats.
The push for training chemical biologists seems to be driven by academics who are using it as a means of marketing their research programs, not by any real demand for people with these skill sets. I enjoyed my program immensely, and I hope the situation changes, but the inter-disciplinary nature has hurt as much as it has helped.
Rather than looking only at an institution, the advice I always give is to look for a graduate advisor first, and then decide if the institution also fits. My PhD advisor was in a fairly normal Chemistry department, but he made a point of hiring into our moderate sized group people with a diversity of backgrounds, and our group had a huge range of chemical biology projects.
I graduated from a chemical biology program that was a subset of an organic chemistry doctoral degree. After the initial lab rotations, we selected one, and that was more or less the end of the chemical biology program. We took the same classes and worked in the same groups as synthetic chemists, but the chemistry department only helped the synthetic chemists secure employment after graduation.
At least thirty companies were on campus looking for medicinal chemists; none wanted chemical biologists. The department and our own advisors were completely ineffective in career guidance (unless of course, you wanted to be a chemical biology professor). I was able to market myself as a molecular biologist, and was able to obtain such a position. However, I feel that the chemical biology program made me an average biologist who happens to know a lot about organic chemistry.
As much as I like chemical biology, this interest simply doesn’t yet correspond with industrial trends. My skill set makes me a difficult candidate to place, and I wish I realized this earlier in my graduate career. I would have stuck with synthetic organic chemistry if I knew how precarious my future employment would be, and how little my program would help me begin a career.
I graduated recently from the University of Leeds after completing my Masters in Chemical Biology.
I think the main advantage of doing a Masters in an inter-disciplinary area, is that it widens your research horizons in the near future. For instance my undergraduation major was chemistry, but after graduating in chemical biology, I can now consider a phd in an area like Bio-organic chemistry, which is just an off-shoot from conventional organic chemistry, along with an element of “applied science” in it. In my opinion, employment in the Industry, is dependent not only on your area of specialization, but also on the specific techniques or skills that you have, to offer to the Industry. Chemical biology is definitely a broad-based foray into research, however it does have subsets like bio-organic or bio-physical which can be tailored to cater to commercial pursuits. Programmes like chemical biology give us the flexibility to choose between academic and Industry-oriented research. I have observed that the Industry tends to hire synthetic organic chemistry and train them in biology if reqd. This is so, not only because a subject like biology, can be grasped at a later stage, but also because a lot of drug development, delivery, synthesis is based extensively on synthetic organic chemistry. However in the United States, where the attainment of a phd takes 5-6 yrs, there is plenty of time and opportunity for biologists to strengthen their foundations in organic chemistry, and categorize themselves as bio-organic chemists. However, ultimately, the fruition of your job pursuits, is based exclusively on your skill-sets. Most inter-disciplinary fields stand on the pillars of pure-science fields. So while chemical biology can broaden your research options, it would be difficult to seek a job, if one’s fundamentals in at least one pure-science discipline, are not strong.