Francis Collins

The NIH Graduate Partnerships Program (GPP) held its first annual graduate student retreat September 26th, 2001, at the Cloisters. NIH is home to more than 150 graduate students—from near and as far as England and Israel. The purpose of the retreat was to recapture a universitylike experience for the students and give them a time and place to discuss their research with one another and form bonds of community.

Poster Clusters: (foreground) Ron Skupsky explains "mathematical analysis of cyclic metabolic pathways for phosphoinositide synthesis" to Andre Phillips (holding glass) and Evan Thompson (holding helmet); (background, left to right) Anne- Marie Hansen, Nancy Bae, and Walter Schlapkohl

Keynote speaker Francis Collins, NHGRI director, offered a brief history of the Human Genome Project and envisioned virtually unlimited research opportunities flowing from its completion—especially in the proteomics and drug development areas. More than their predecessors, he said, the current classes of graduate students have an amazing assortment of data and technology with which to approach their work.

GPP director Mary DeLong (left) and office assistant Wade Nierenhausen

Examples of that work were presented by 12 senior-level graduate students, whose current research spanned a broad array of topics from transcriptional regulation of an aging-related gene (Nancy Bae, University of Maryland) to the classification of placental mammals (Eduardo Eizirik, University of Maryland) and developing new Fourier transform infrared spectroscopic imaging techniques (Dan Fernandez, University of South Florida). NIH investigators moderated these discussions.

Students also had an opportunity to discuss their research on a one-on-one basis at a poster session, where the research presented was similarly diverse, including elaborations of protein structure threading (Natasha Sefcovic, the John Hopkins University) and the RNA polymerase of bacteriophage (Anne-Marie Hansen, Odense University, Denmark).

Michael Gottesman, deputy director for intramural research, and Mary DeLong, GPP director, also addressed the gathering, praising both NIH for the vast scientific and human resources it offers students and the students for the quality of their work and their accomplishments.

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