Vanderbilt graduate school application fee waiver

Twenty-eight Vanderbilt chemistry faculty currently support the research activity of over 100 graduate students and ~40 postdoctoral research associates and senior research staff. I serve as Director of Graduate Studies for our program, and had the pleasure of scheduling the dissertation defenses for 20 of our graduate students over the past year. These students have gone on to post-doctoral positions at CalTech, MIT, Princeton, Yale, and the National Cancer Institute, while others began their careers in industry at AbbVie, Novartis, Merck, and Enanta Pharmaceuticals, among others.

Ten of our current students hold prestigious NSF Graduate Research Fellowships. Chemistry is also the departmental home for a Chemistry-Biology Interface (CBI) Training Grant funded by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, a division of the National Institutes of Health. The Vanderbilt CBI Training Program is in its 16^th year and is one of 32 such programs in the country. Five of our students are current CBI trainees and six more are trainees of the many other NIH training grants on Vanderbilt’s campus.
You may have noticed that the cover of the July 1 issue of Chemical & Engineering News featured the work of Dorothy Ackermann and Kelly Craft, two Vanderbilt graduate students working in Prof. Steven Townsend’s lab. They demonstrated that human milk oligosaccharides show antibacterial activity, suggesting their protective role for newborns against bacterial pathogens. Dorothy defended her thesis this past year and is a post-doctoral associate at the National Cancer Institute. Kelly will defend her thesis in the coming year and has accepted a post-doctoral position at Harvard. This is not the first time that research from our department has graced the cover of C&E News. In 2008, the McLean lab’s pioneering work on ion mobility mass spectrometry was featured.

While not everyone makes the cover of C&E News, our students are highly productive and visible at regional and national meetings. They publish in high-impact journals and their work has been featured on the covers the Journal of Biological Chemistry, Chemical Communications, ACS Infectious Diseases, Journal of Materials Chemistry, and Chemical Research in Toxicology. As such, they are sought by academic, government, and industry labs. I hope that you will recommend our program to your undergraduates. We are offering application fee waivers for applications completed by December 1. Our department offers a broad research portfolio and world-class instrumentation in the supportive environment of a medium-sized graduate program. Vanderbilt has recently established a $300 million Graduate Education and Research Endowment, including a new Russell G. Hamilton Scholars program to support accomplished graduate students. We will shepherd them through their graduate careers and provide them the experimental and intellectual skills to successfully compete at every stage of their future careers.