Student Research | Graduate School of Medical Sciences

Training the next generation of scientists

Weill Cornell Graduate School (WCGS) invites brilliant undergraduates from across the country to intern in our laboratories each summer. The Advancing Cornell Career Experiences for Science Students (ACCESS) summer internship program has been active since 1993 and now boasts over 240 alumni!

This successful program, run by a dedicated team of WCGS faculty, staff, and students, acts as a pipeline to entry into competitive graduate and medical professional programs. Dr. Melissa Boneta...

Congratulations To Our 2021 Graduates

WCGS celebrated our 69th Convocation and Commencement Ceremonies last week where we honored the 2021 graduating class. With over one thousand students and four hundred faculty members, WCGS provides a rich and diverse atmosphere that fosters superior scientific training. Although the 2021 graduating class came to Weill Cornell from different backgrounds, they all shared a desire to pursue their passions and test their creativity. They have produced outstanding scholarship...

Commensal Gut Fungi Fine Tune The Human Antibody Repertoire

The body is full of trillions of bacteria, viruses and fungi that are collectively known as the microbiome. The bulk of these microbes live in our intestines where they are referred to as the gut microbiome. Itai Doron, a graduate student working in the lab of Dr. Iliyan Iliev, Associate Professor of Microbiology and Immunology in Medicine at WCM, studies the interaction between commensal fungi and our immune cells at mucosal surfaces in the body. He recently discovered that gut commensal...

Congratulations to Our NSF Fellows and Honorable Mention Applicants

The National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program (NSF GRFP) ensures the quality, vitality, and diversity of the scientific research in the United States. This prestigious program recognizes and funds outstanding graduate students who are pursuing research-based master's and doctoral degrees in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM).

WCGS students experience high success rates each year, and here, we highlight the two awardees and six students who...

Student Spotlight: Ke Xu, Ph.D. '21

2021 marks the 100th anniversary of the discovery of aerobic glycolysis by German physician Otto Warburg—the Warburg Effect. Warburg discovered that fast-proliferating cancer cells produce energy from glucose in an inefficient manner. Rather than oxidizing the glucose molecule with oxygen inside of mitochondria, cancer cells catabolize it via lactate dehydrogenase (LDH)-mediated fermentation. This oxygen-independent process occurs quickly but leaves much of the energy in glucose untouched....

Tri-I CBM Student Develops a Method to Measure Differential Splicing Differences and Quantify the Differences in Transcript Usage

Anoushka Joglekar grew up in Pune, India, a metropolis with rich historical and cultural roots dating back several centuries. Joglekar came to the United States to pursue her undergraduate studies at the Ohio State University and joined the Tri-I Computational Biology and Medicine (Tri-I CBM) in 2017. Part of WCGS’s appeal was the direct access to some of the greatest research labs in the country. “I had the freedom to choose the focus of my research and I appreciate the highly collaborative...

Pharmacology Students Receive Prestigious PhRMA Fellowship in Drug Discovery

WCGS third-year Ph.D. Pharmacology students Svena Verma and Albert Agustinus were recently awarded Drug Discovery Predoctoral Fellowships in the amount of $25,000 per year for two years from the PhRMA Foundation. They are two out of just five recipients of this prestigious fellowship.The PhRMA Foundation is a national non-profit organization dedicated to supporting a variety of research projects to help advance innovative scientific research and education by awarding fellowships and grants....

Student Spotlight: Nevin Yusofova, Ph.D. '20

Nevin Yusufova (Ph.D. ’20), a recent graduate of the BCMB Allied program, has been interested in drug discovery since her undergraduate studies at Colgate University where she synthesized bioactive small molecules for further testing in cellular models. Prior to joining WCGS, Yusufova worked at a biotech startup in Boston with collaborators in Harvard Medical School to develop therapeutics against endothelial dysfunction and atherosclerosis.

Recently, her work in the Melnick Lab...

Student Team Awarded Research!America Microgrant to Launch Science Policy-Focused Podcast

When first-year Pharmacology student Naira Abou-Ghali messaged the Science and Education Policy Association (SEPA) Slack channel about an award that provides funding to graduate student-led science policy initiatives that focus on civic engagement, Ellie Thompson, Nina Glenn and Joanna Yeung wasted no time. The group put together a proposal to create a science policy-focused podcast and quickly submitted it to the Research!America organization. “We developed the goals of this podcast, and...

finding-artistic-inspiration-in-the-culture-dish

Finding Artistic Inspiration from Cells in a Culture Dish

As scientists, we often find beauty in experimental images, whether it be a micrograph of cells in a dish or a scan of the human brain, but few of us have the artistic talent to turn these images into works of art. Tanya Jain, a 3rd year student in the Neuroscience program, did just that! Her artistic rendering of astrocytes derived from pluripotent stem cells landed the cover of the August 5th edition of Neuron.