Training

The Interdisciplinary Graduate Education Program in Regenerative Medicine is an innovative program that focuses on producing future leaders in academia, industry and regulatory oversight. Through a collaborative approach, the program seeks to solve complex research problems focused on promoting tissue regeneration following injury and disease while at the same time drawing attention to the societal impacts and entrepreneurship associated with newly emerging scientific discoveries in the field of regenerative medicine. The student and faculty community that embodies the RM IGEP represents varied disciplines that include stem cell biology, biomedical engineering, science and technology in society, business development, and many more. Students are exposed to collaborative research projects that transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries and require teamwork in order to develop the tools that build leaders in the science, engineering, and business of the future.

Our graduate training program provides students the opportunity to conduct specialized research in the discipline of their choosing as it relates to emerging treatments in regenerative medicine and the societal impacts of moving our discoveries into clinical applications. The program integrates traditional didactic instruction, interdisciplinary coursework, student interaction, community development, and cross-disciplinary research experience, including ethics and professional development training. Key components of this program include:

• Interactive seminar series (focused on current and emerging trends in disease therapy, assisted devices, robotics, biomaterials for regenerative medicine)
• Unique interdisciplinary course: Regenerative Medicine: Science and Society
• Interdisciplinary research experience 
• Team building activities to develop collaboration among participating academic units such as our recent retreat which was hugely successful and is slated as an annual event
• Campus-wide seminars that enrich the culture of collaborative research embodied at VT

By educating and collaborating across specialized fields of medicine, our IGEP imparts a thorough understanding of the cross-disciplinary approach and collaborative network needed to conduct transformative research, how to commercialize discoveries in regenerative medicine, and how to develop new strategies for integrating scientific discoveries into real world applications.