The Trainee Recruitment and Admissions Committee is responsible for recruiting policies and soliciting applications from historically under-represented minorities. All trainees must first be admitted to the either the BME or ECE department, including those students in an M.D./Ph.D. program. Students from other departments may request admission to this imaging portfolio program and be admitted with the consent of their department and the admissions committee. This committee will examine applicant files of the subset of students interested in imaging sciences. The committee will make offers for prospective students to visit the campus during the spring. This committee is also responsible for coordinating recruitment activities throughout the year. Committee membership consists of the two PIs and a representative (graduate advisor) from BME and ECE.
The inter-disciplinary research and education experience of the program brings together teams of faculty, students, and clinicians with diverse skills to solve clinically relevant imaging problems from the molecular to the organ level. Interactions will be facilitated through coursework, seminars, research collaborations, internships with industrial partners, conference presentations, and joint publications. We will actively recruit students from historically minority undergraduate institutions and strive to support ethnic diversity in our trainees. Partnerships with the McCombs Business School, the Murchison Chair of Free Enterprise at UT Austin, and our industrial partners will provide our students non-academic career opportunities upon completion of their degrees. A major emphasis of this training program is on professional development to launch our trainees into an ethical and productive career in imaging science. Our Industrial and Governmental Liaison Committee will meet periodically with individual students about job placement.
The principal investigators have studied the formative and summative assessment of the cellular and molecular imaging NSF-IGERT training program at our institution and the Whitaker report on graduate training in imaging. One of the lessons learned is that it is challenging to meet the needs of students with very different disciplinary training (e.g., biologists and engineers) in a single course. Some students and faculty from our NSF-IGERT training program have expressed concerns that educational objectives were not achieved because of the lack of common background knowledge in math and engineering. Thus, we have designed this training program to admit students with the prerequisite math and engineering skills to take focused core classes in imaging science. A general criticism of existing imaging training programs is that many are either too broadly or too narrowly focused. We have attempted to circumvent that problem by beginning the training experience with an introduction to all biomedical imaging modalities and then providing a focused laboratory experience on a single imaging modality, device, or contrast agent. The focused laboratory experience is intended to generate real data that the students will analyze in the subsequent image processing, mathematical modeling, and informatics courses.