BME 502 Foundations

DRO Medical Imaging

Advice for BME Applicants

Cancer Research Career Advice

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my Advice to Applicants to Graduate Studies in BME

from Walter G. O'Dell, PhD
Jan. 16, 2003
updated April 29, 2009

Greetings,

We are always honored to have students consider our department for potential graduate studies. It is nice to know that we are becoming famous around the world. I have put together answers to some common questions regarding our program and funding, and am including them below. I hope this addresses your biggest concerns. Questions more specific to the application process itself should probably go to Donna Porcelli (click here to email her), the department's admissions administrator. Feel free to email me any additional questions or thoughts you might have. Good luck with the application process and all your future studies.

Funding:

  As with pretty much all decent BME PhD graduate programs in the US, all students who get into our PhD program are pretty much guaranteed funding throughout their entire graduate student career. The policy at the UofR is that the department has guaranteed funding for all students during their first 15 months. After 15 months, it is expected that the student will have found a lab that they are at least considering and that lab will help cover their funding. I would think it unlikely that the department would not find a way to support a student should their chosen lab not have sufficient funds or somehow their first lab choice falls through. Funding includes complete coverage of all tuition costs, health care, plus a living stipend each year. The stipend seems to increase each year. For the year 2008 the tuition scholarship came to around $30,000, health care coverage $1,800 and the stipend was around $23,000. Teaching assistantships for 1-2 semesters is included/required as part of your training. You should be able to find a very similar arrangement at any decent BME PhD program in the U.S. Frankly, if I were you and were considering a school that did not virtually guarantee funding for all students, I would find another school.

Funding for masters-only students is not (yet) guaranteed here, although there is some funding available. Often, individual labs will have funds set aside for MS-level students. There are schools out there that guarantee complete funding for all master's students (for example, I know that Johns Hopkins Univ. does), so you might want to look around. BME masters students here get a 50% tuition waiver (75% for UofR undergraduate alumni). Currently at the UofR several MS students are part of the UofR's combined 5-year BS-MS program. For 2008, there were around 8 students pursuing a 2 year MS degree having come from outside the UofR, and most were from outside the United States. There are currently 3 MS students working in my lab and their reseach projects fall withing the bounds larger, already-funded projects, so we are covering the other 50% of her tuition costs, but they do not receive a stipend.

Consider also generating your own funding by applying for graduate student research fellowhips from any of several sources, including the National Science Foundation (NSF), NASA , the National Institutes of Health (NIH), to name a few. I'll cheat here and grab a link to Cornell's Student Info site which posts an exhaustive list of these and other fellowship opportunities.

Selecting a Lab:

  The guaranteed 15 months of funding is intended to give all students an opportunity to experience the different variety of research work and labs that are available to them for their thesis work. Our PhD program requires at least 3 rotations be done by each student during their first year here. Thus, it is not expected (or even advised necessarily) that the students find or solidify a particular lab before they arrive here. In fact, my personal experience was that I went to grad school with a certain project area (orthopedics) in mind, but once I got there I found the field of MRI research that I liked much better. I could not have foreseen myself working in MR research upon entering grad school since I had never even seen an MRI scanner until I did a rotation with the MR group my second year. So my advice is that if you have a plan already, feel free to us it to help select your schools of choice, but to try to keep your options open until you get a chance to see what is available here as you might find something that even better suits your interests and abilities.

Application Tips:

  I have never been on the BME graduate admissions committee here, so I really don't know exactly what they look for or how they go about the process of selecting from the applicant pool. I also have really no input to the committee, so I can't help you much there. [Translation: don't bother sending me cookies in an attempt to improve your application score as it will have no real effect. However, if you are planning to send cookies to other people and you need a test subject for your latest recipe I would be interested in helping out.] Overall, though, I recommend that you write in your personal statement something that uniquely identifies yourself. With over 100 applications, they are bound to see many people with the same course backgrounds and similar general interests in research and teaching, so above those things is there anything that tells us about you in particular? In my application, I mentioned that the first time I had been introduced to the field of BME (it was not a well-established field at the time) was on a visit at a chiropractic college that my brother was attending. During my interviews people would identify me as the one "whose brother was a chiropractor". I'm not certain that that was even a positive connection for all the interviewers, but at least they had something that identified me separate from the other applicants.


our Advice for People Thinking of Pursueing a Career in Cancer Research


from Walter O'Dell, PhD and Bruce Fenton, PhD
Sept 4, 2004

This page is in response to questions asked by others with hopes to get into cancer research, but were not quite sure how to get to there.

Scope of Cancer Research:

  Of course the field of cancer research is pretty broad. There are people here who work from the cellular biology side, studying the effects that different agents have on metabolic and/or protein pathways in cells, etc.; and in our department they look at how radiation affects cells and how radiation effects are moderated by the chemical agents noted above. I (O'Dell) happen to come from the engineering side where I don't care how radiation or chemical agents affect the cells, but rather how to better design tools to detect, track and follow-up tumors being hit it with a focused radiation beam. Where you want to go with it thus depends upon what area of investigation (chemistry, bio, engr, etc.) you are most comfortable with and talented in.

Selecting an Undergraduate Major and Courses:

  Because the cancer research field is pretty broad your undergraduate major could be just about any field relating to biology or biochemistry or molecular biology or biomedical engineering. To be honest in the first 2 years of college it probably does not really matter all that much what major one is in as all the first year courses are pretty much the same for all majors, although if you have an idea of where you want to be going that might help you select more appropriate electives. The BME program here is intended to give the students an idea of the biology/physiology of the body, and to give a solid foundation in engineering skills of applied math, mechanics, signal processing, etc. Our advice is to obtain a firm foundation in the biological and physical sciences as an undergraduate. Your specific focus will most likely come much later.

Selecting a Career Path:

  These types of majors will provide you with the education you would need to start work in a technical position in either industrial or academic cancer research labs. In order to obtain a position in which you are developing independent cancer research projects (again either in academics or industry), you would most likely need further post-graduate study: most likely a PhD -- at this point you would concentrate on some specific field of interest, i.e., immunology, genetics, molecular biology, physiology, or something like biomedical engineering.

Our Career Paths:

  W. O'Dell:
I started as a bio major (at Cornell) and after 3 semesters transferred into engineering (Applied and Engineering Physics to be precise). This switch was something I had in mind from day one as a backup in case the bio stuff did not go as I had hoped/expected, and that turned out to be the case. I'll note that at the time there was no BME program there (or anywhere really) else I would have gone into that. I took a couple more high-level applied math courses while as a bio major so my transition went pretty smoothly as I had all the engineering requirements covered. At that time I had no specific intent to go into cancer research. I did a PhD in BME in the area of MRI-based heart motion analysis, and then did a 4-year post-doc (in San Diego) working on finite element modeling of the heart. I did not start doing any cancer releated research until I took the position here at the UofR after completing my post-doc.

B. Fenton:
I received my B.S. and M.S. in chemical engineering and then my Ph.D. in biomedical engineering. In my case, the biomedical engineering research involved computer modeling of blood flow in vascular networks. I also had additional post-doctoral training in biomedical engineering, looking at in vitro blood flow experiments. However, I didn't actually begin any cancer-related research until about 5 years later, when I began looking at oxygen transport and blood flow in tumors (in mice). Over the past 15 years or so, my work has evolved into image processing of immunohistochemically staining frozen tumor sections, which allow me to automatically determine changes in tumor blood vessel patterns and oxygen delivery, in order to optimize radiation and drug therapies. So, as you can see, I had no specific training for cancer research until well after my PhD degree. And most of the techniques that I'm now using didn't even exist at that time.