Program Description

TRAINING‎ > ‎

The purpose of this training program is to create mentorship teams for PhD trainees that will produce imaging scientists who are able to invent new techniques and translate those techniques into clinical use.

For each PhD student the mentorship teams will include 3 people:

Clinical Mentor, Engineering Mentor, Clinical Peer (usually a clinical fellow).

The curriculum will be:
                                               -first year of medical school

                                               -high level engineering courses

                                               -first year fellows clinical courses and conferences

The training programs of all clinical departments participating are very enthusiastic to include the PhD candidates in their resident and fellow training: Cardiology, Radiology, Oncology, Rad Oncology, Neurology

This program will build on the existing strong research community in imaging applications that exists at Johns Hopkins. Many Hopkins trainees have found successful careers in imaging sciences after pursuing a PhD at Johns Hopkins involving both engineering a clinical investigators. This program will help galvanize these efforts into a coherent training program and community, attract the top students into the imaging sciences, and bring the attention of industrial partners onto the applications research carried out within the program. The program in trans-institutional.

Mentorship Structure: This T32 training program aims to be trans-departmental (within Hopkins) and trans-Institutional(at the NIH). Each PhD candidate will have a Clinical Mentor drawn from a clinical department such as Radiology, Cardiology, Oncology, Neuroscience, Radiation Oncology, Surgery …, and an Engineering Mentor, from departments such as BME, EE, Computer Science… . We hope to fund slots in this T32 from NIH Institutes with intrinsic interest in creating a new generation of translational imaging scientists such as: NBIB, NHLBI, NCI, NINDS, NIMH.
Figure 1 The mentorship structure for each PhD trainee. Each trainee will have at least 3 mentors with either the Clinical Mentor or the Engineering Mentor acting a primary thesis advisor.
The PhD students will also be paired with a Clinical Peer; these are residents or fellows in clinical department research programs who will become part of the team, and a key resource for the PhD candidate. Through years of experience working on translational research, the directors recognize that a clinical peer who can spend a significant amount of time with the PhD candidate is a key component of the candidates “medical training”. The project need not be in perfect alignment to the research project of the resident or fellow for them to act as a clinical peer. The clinical peer can give the PhD student extremely valuable real world training in the open problems about diagnosis and treatment of particular diseases. Letters of support from the directors of many of the resident and fellow training programs within Johns Hopkins Medicine, such as Radiology, Cardiology, Neurosurgery, Radiation Oncology, etc., will included in an Appendix.
Admission and Progress: Admission to the program will be included in the normal annual BME PhD program admission. Students will be in the BME PhD program and follow the milestones therein. Focused recruiting will be carried out to attract students from top EE and Comp Sci departments across the country.
Committees and Administrative Structure: This training program will involve a broad spectrum of participants making it essential that each group have an effective forum for feedback. The TPTRI will have four committees: Core Faculty, Curriculum Committee, Research Committee, and the External Advisory Committee. The composition and function of each of these committees are described below.

Comments