| December 5, 1996 | . | Vol. 26 No. 15 |
A few months ago, Penn State's Life Sciences Consortium (LSC) consisted of little more than high hopes, a modest Web site and a few determined deans and professors.
If you haven't previously noticed the LSC, now is the time to begin paying attention. You're bound to start bumping into people who identify themselves with the consortium as faculty members, students or advisers.
Officially, the LSC came into being on July 1 of this year after being approved by the University Faculty Senate and the Board of Trustees. It is light on administrative structure: Nina Fedoroff, who holds the Willaman Chair of life sciences and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, is director. The graduate program co-directors are C. Robert Matthews, professor of chemistry and Eberly family professor in biotechnology, and Judith Bond, professor and chairperson of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and assistant dean for graduate education and the MD/PhD program in the College of Medicine.
The LSC concept has evolved over a two-year period. A steering committee of senior faculty members from colleges with a life science component was originally charged with devising new approaches to research and graduate education for what was then referred to as a division of biological sciences.
Today's Life Sciences Consortium is quite a different concept than an academic division. It is a virtual organization that has no faculty of its own, but spans six colleges: Medicine, Engineering, Science, Health and Human Development, Agricultural Sciences and the Liberal Arts. More than 150 faculty members from those colleges are working together to promote research between the life science disciplines and other disciplines, and to provide a learning environment that integrates research and teaching, theory and practice. All of this is accomplished while using the most contemporary techniques, equipment and electronic communication. Interactive video conferencing has removed the barriers to cooperation between faculty members on the University Park and Hershey campuses.
The LSC's new integrative biosciences degree program has been approved. Fedoroff said the new Ph.D. and M.S. curricula will strive to produce a new type of graduate: aware of and comfortable with multiple career options, experienced in non-academic as well as academic settings and able to function both as an independent scholar and a member of a problem-solving team.
Fedoroff noted that at a recent NSF-sponsored workshop, a graduate student said simply, "You're preparing us for careers that don't exist."
"The goal of the LSC's graduate degree program is to change these expectations by preparing students for a much more varied career," Fedoroff said. "We will expose our students to the increasing variety of occupations that demand scientific and technical knowledge. We will teach them to be life-long learners and problem solvers able to work both as individuals and members of a team. I believe that these skills will be increasingly valued in academia in the future as the availability of research funding continues to decline."
There are already nine LSC student fellows who were chosen last March and began arriving in September. These first fellows, who will receive two years of LSC support, were chosen from among students applying to existing departments and programs that had faculty members actively involved in developing new LSC options.
Matthews, co-director of the graduate program, said future fellows will not be chosen in this way. Rather, he and co-director Bond, together with Dorothy Sweeney, graduate fellows coordinator, will recruit them directly into the Integrative Biosciences Degree Program (IBDP). However, that doesn't mean that the IBDP will compete with existing life science degree programs.
"We're looking to complement existing programs and to work with them as much as we possibly can. What we've done in creating this new program is try to recognize the trends in research that have occurred over the last few decades," Matthews said. "Research activities and training experiences need to go beyond traditional departmental and disciplinary boundaries."
Current plans call for Integrative Biosciences Fellows to be funded by their faculty mentor or preceptor after the first two years of LSC support. LSC has funding for about 40 new students per year or up to 80 students at any one time. This will increase the demand for follow-up funding for the students' concluding years of study. To meet the demand, LSC expects to co-fund up to 50 new life science faculty hires, including 12 this year.
"The committee picked proposals that expanded interdisciplinary connections and added needed expertise," Fedoroff said. "For example, we approved two proposals for immunology faculty on the University Park Campus. Immunology is an area of strength at The Hershey Medical Center and the new University Park positions will build new bridges, enabling our faculty to collaborate in ways they couldn't before."
Matthews said that, eventually, the LSC also would like to offer students the opportunity to pursue a traditional discipline as well as participate in one of the LSC's seven non-traditional integrative bioscience options.
"We're hoping that departments and existing programs will adopt these options, permitting students greater flexibility." he said. Dual advisers and internships are features that Matthews said the students he has talked with really like.
Fedoroff noted that internships offered through the IBDP will not necessarily be traditional co-op-style jobs. They may be shorter or intermittent. The student may go off campus for just three or four months or for a month at a time. The objective is to make the internship an integral part of the graduate degree program wherever possible. Both the timing and duration will be flexible.
Sweeney will be exploring possible internship opportunities in the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and agricultural companies, as well as opportunities in law firms, on Congressional staffs, at federal agencies and other science-based organizations.
"When a student comes in and says, 'I'd like a career in a certain company or field' but doesn't know how to get a job there, Dorothy Sweeney and I are willing to go right into the company, firm or agency and say, 'OK, we want to talk to you about the possibility of an internship,'" Matthews said.
For more information, visit the Life Sciences Consortium's Web site: http://www.lsc.psu.edu
Now, the LSC has nine student fellows, a fellows coordinator, two graduate program co-directors, as well as Ph.D. and M.S. degree programs in integrative biosciences. And, it has given the go-ahead to departments in four colleges to hire 12 new faculty members during the current academic year, each to be co-funded by the Life Sciences Consortium.
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