The goal of the Developmental and Stem Cell Biology Training Program is to provide pre-doctoral individuals from diverse backgrounds with the scientific and academic training required to pursue investigative careers and become future leaders in biomedical research and other science related fields. The Training Program is an integral but distinct part of the umbrella Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences. The program is inter-disciplinary and incorporates research programs in Developmental and Stem Cell Biology from the following six PhD programs at WCGS:

WCGS is proud to host the following training grant programs

Predoctoral Training in Pharmacological Sciences (T32-GM141949)
Program Directors: Dr. Steven Gross and Dr. Kristen Pleil
Predoctoral Slots: 8

In 2014, our retreat became a surprise celebration of gut microbiota. Our scheduled keynote speaker could not attend last minute, and so our very own Dr. Eric Pamer came to the rescue with a fantastic talk about his lab’s work in this field. While not planned, it was a special treat to hear a talk from one of our own faculty members for the keynote session. We also welcomed multiple new faculty to the program in 2014, who each gave talks to introduce their work to the program: Andrea Schietinger, Frederic Geissmann, Tobias Hohl, and David Artis.

The 2015 Immunology and Microbial Pathogenesis Scientific Retreat took place at the historic Mohonk Mountain House in beautiful upstate New York. This year the retreat hosted Harvard University’s Dr. Diane Mathis, who delivered  an outstanding keynote on regulatory T cell control of organismal homeostasis. We also proudly welcomed Dr. Barry Sleckman and Dr. Randy Longman to the IMP program, whose talks about the research interests of their respective laboratories garnered much interest from prospective graduate rotation students.

The IMP program returned to Mohonk Mountain House for our annual retreat, where we celebrate the program’s scientific achievements with the backdrop of beautiful fall foliage. That year’s student, postdoc, and faculty speakers fell into four categories: nuclear receptors/transcriptional regulation to start the day on Thursday, followed by mucosal barriers, talks about Mycobacterium tuberculosis on Friday morning, and lymphocytes to round out the afternoon program. In addition to talks from our own scientific community, we were honored to host Dr.

We had the pleasure of hosting Dr. Yasmine Belkaid, from the National Institute of Health (NIH) to present the keynote address on homeostatic immunity to the microbiota. We also heard from four new faculty members of IMP, Dr. Julie Blander, Dr. Virginia Pascual, Dr. Steve Josefowicz, and Dr. Juan Cubillos-Ruiz. Students and post-docs gave talks ranging from Mycobacterium tuberculosis pathogenesis, immune responses to viral infections, auto-immunity, tumor immunology, and mucosal immunology.