Graduate Studies awarded career training grant

The MUSC College of Graduate Studies is among only seven institutions in the United States that received the prestigious and highly-competitive Career Guidance for Trainees Award from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund. This grant, which is awarded only periodically, enables co-principal investigators Paula Traktman, Ph.D., dean of the College of Graduate Studies, and Cynthia Wright, Ph.D., associate dean for admissions and career development, to design and offer an essential entrepreneur-building career preparation course to trainees in the biomedical sciences.

This grant is also significant in that it allows the college to advance recent trends in the area of postgraduate education. A seminal report released in June 2012 by the National Institutes of Health detailed the findings of a committee that had been tasked with developing a model for a sustainable and diverse U.S. biomedical research workforce.

According to the report, the number of postdoctoral scholars has continued to grow substantially while the number of Ph.D.s who move into tenured or tenure-track faculty positions had declined from approximately 34 percent in 1993 to about 26 percent at that time. These types of circumstances cause competition for positions in the academic arena to be more intense than ever. Despite these noteworthy changes, graduate training continues to prepare students for academic research positions almost exclusively, the committee concluded.

In the final analysis, the NIH committee challenged graduate programs to offer greater opportunities for biomedical Ph.D. students and postdoctoral researchers to explore a much broader range of career options, without adding to the length of training, so they would be in a position to face the realities of the current economy, and ultimately, participate successfully in an evolving science marketplace — both in and outside of academia.

Traktman took that challenge and ran with it. “Trainees in the biomedical sciences face an ever-changing environment of professional opportunities and need to be in a position to make informed choices about professional and career development in order to maximize their career potential,” she said. “This course is a huge first step in our ability to introduce trainees to entrepreneurship, novel business models and myriad employment possibilities and prepare them for the future.”

Kathleen Brady, M.D., Ph.D., distinguished university professor, vice president for research and director of the South Carolina Clinical and Translational Research Institute (SCTR), said that preparing them for the future is something the college is doing successfully. “Our College of Graduate Studies is fully committed to facilitating the career development of young scientists and has an extraordinary track record of providing the type of guidance that encourages them to branch out and grow in inventive directions to increase their chances of success. Receiving this grant is clearly evidence that Dean Traktman is breaking new ground and leading the college in the right direction."

Brady noted, too, that the Burroughs Wellcome Fund is a highly prestigious granting body that funds particularly worthy projects in the biomedical sciences and is known in the research community as one of the most significant funders of biomedical research. “This grant places Drs. Traktman and Wright and MUSC among an elite group receiving this important nod of approval,” she added.  

Dual missions

Since Traktman took the helm of the College of Graduate Studies in 2015, she has made it a priority to create pathways to attract and retain the best graduate and postdoctoral researchers, while also preparing them for a broad–based and evolving economy.

The CGS has two overarching objectives, she said. “One is training the biomedical workforce of tomorrow. That is our primary mission in all of its glory. Secondly, however, it’s important to remember that at MUSC, our students and postdocs are the intellectual workforce of today. So when you think of the $247 million of grant money that comes in — it’s the graduate students and postdocs who are doing the work and getting the preliminary data.”

Traktman said that at MUSC, like any other academic health center, if there weren’t a graduate school, the basic sciences faculty would all likely leave. “These students and postdocs are the people who have the passion and are going to be creative and innovative. Everybody realizes that the people that we bring here, train and mentor are the research intelligentsia task force of today, and we’re also training the workforce for tomorrow. What we do is education and research tied together.  You can’t separate them.”

Wright agreed. “Since the NIH report, there has been an awareness that we need to increase career opportunities for people who are graduating with Ph.D.s in the biomedical sciences. This is part of a movement. All of us in grad programs across the country are thinking of ways to help our students prepare for a breadth of careers beyond the traditional pathway of academic research.”

Entrepreneurship

When Traktman first arrived at MUSC, she took mental inventory, and realized there were a number of features that distinguished MUSC from other academic medical centers across the country and presented unique opportunities to break new ground.

“What did we have at MUSC that not everybody has? We have six colleges, for one. That is unique. Another thing is we clearly have a strong innovation group and strong Foundation for Research Development — so I immediately thought, ‘Entrepreneurship!’ We have all the pieces in place to be strong in entrepreneurship. A number of faculty here have already started companies, and there are others who are providing very strong faculty mentorship on how to do that. Not to mention, it’s very big across the country.”

Entrepreneurship became her focus. “I wanted to create a course focusing on entrepreneurship and turn it into a full–fledged certificate program, so that students could go bigger. No matter what their career plans are, they need to be aware of how to patent and market intellectual property that result from their discoveries.”

Traktman began devising strategies and a curriculum with the FRD, Center for Innovation and SCTR, which would provide the type of innovative supplemental training related to career development and entrepreneurship she envisioned, and give trainees in the biomedical sciences skills and value added in the community. “MUSC’s Jesse Goodwin and Tom Finnegan were invaluable partners in the work, bringing a wealth of expertise and a deep portfolio of professional contacts,” she added.

It just so happened that the plans they had been working on synced perfectly with BWF’s request for proposals. “What was just amazing was that the RFA could have been written for us. It was just a collision of the grant opportunity and the fact that we had already sketched out the whole syllabus for the course. The constellations essentially aligned,” said Traktman.

Wright agreed. “It wasn’t as though we looked at the grant invitation and thought, ‘What can we do? This is a wonderful opportunity — how can we do something?’ No. We’d already perceived a need and were working on it. Then came this opportunity. They just intersected.”

The program has a lot of moving parts, and Wright explained the grant would support a person who would work with the program for a year, pulling together all the various pieces and online modalities.

Once finalized and actualized, the online curriculum will be offered in modules via a web–based portal. The modules will be used as a foundation for the certificate program, which will be offered initially to students, postdocs and faculty on the MUSC campus.

Learning to pitch

To further enhance the program, two face–to–face conferences will be presented at MUSC, one at near the beginning and the other at the end of the program. “At the first session, participants will suggest an idea for a novel technology that they will use as the foundation for a ‘virtual company,’” Wright said. “They will receive feedback from the certificate faculty that will help to guide them as they progress in the program. At the final session, people will participate in a ‘pitch session’ that will test their ability to present their ideas in a compelling fashion to a non–science audience.”

“It will be much like ‘Shark Tank,’” Traktman added with a laugh, referring to the television show where budding entrepreneurs propose unique projects to billionaires in order to secure investments to launch them.

The conferences, Traktman added, will also include presentations from various entrepreneurs and business people who will speak on a variety of topics related to developing new technologies and companies. Workshops will be offered in an effort to help each participant in areas such as writing curriculum vitae, perfecting interviewing skills and developing an effective business presentation.

Traktman feels these types of confidence–building exercises will help prepare the participants for the realities of the competitive business world — valuable resources to possess, she feels. Ultimately, once the program has been launched, she and Wright plan to market it for a national audience so that non-local participants can take the online course and travel to MUSC for the biannual weekend conferences.

The program will be overseen by a steering committee comprised of local faculty who have expertise in entrepreneurship and evaluated by obtaining feedback from the participants, whose future outcomes will be closely tracked.

Traktman explained that for trainees, whether they choose to remain in academia or not, moving from training to meaningful employment can require skills not always learned at the bench.
“Employers today require job applicants to possess entrepreneurialism, a depth and breadth of knowledge, tangible experience, critical thinking skills, project management, and the ability to communicate complex concepts effectively. Trainees are faced with roles that perhaps they hadn’t anticipated when they decided upon a career in the biomedical sciences.”

By that same token, Traktman said, graduate students and postdocs feel they often fall short in acquiring or translating skills they have gained beyond research. “It falls to us, then, to ensure our trainees not only are educated about the myriad career pathways available to them and have acquired the ‘value-added’ skills necessary to compete for valued positions, but ultimately, that they are able to excel in the workplace regardless of whether they choose to become principal investigators or move into private industry.”  

Both Traktman and Wright feel their program is positioned to achieve these goals, and they are ecstatic to have received the grant that will enable them to make a substantive impact.

“This stamp of approval from such a fantastic organization means a great deal to us,” Wright said. “We were aspirational. We aimed high. We competed with the big boys — nationwide — and we got it. It feels as though we have received the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. Whatever the Burroughs Wellcome Fund does, they do well. I couldn’t be more pleased to be part of the initiative to offer our students and postdocs additional career development opportunities such as this exciting program in entrepreneurship that will help trainees learn how to patent and market intellectual property.”