Curriculum Requirements for Pre-doctoral Trainees

The graduate college requires at least 72 SH of graduate coursework for the doctoral degree. Each academic department specifies the minimum number of course work hours and dissertation research hours for their program, and may further specify specific core courses for their program. For the training program, there is a set of six core courses that all pre-doctoral trainees will take:

• HHP:3500, Human Physiology: Organ system approach to physiology in order to understand normal function of the human body from the submolecular and cellular levels to the whole organism; emphasis on the development of a mechanistic understanding of organ system function and integrated physiological function across systems to promote homeostatic regulation in the human body.

• BME:5210, Medical Imaging Physics: Physics and data acquisition techniques of major medical imaging modalities (X-ray, CT, MR, ultrasound, PET, SPECT); physical interactions of energy with living tissue; principles and methods for acquiring imaging data and subsequent image construction; how individual modalities influence image quality; MATLAB programming required.
• BME:5540, Quantitative Studies in the Respiratory and Cardiovascular Systems: Quantitative physiological aspects of respiratory and cardiovascular systems; classical models of these systems are considered including lumped element models, branching tree structures, and distributed parameter models to predict wave propagation in compliant walled tubes filled with compressible or incompressible fluids; development of extensive computer models to simulate the behavior of these systems in frequency- and time-domains, under various conditions of health and disease.
• BIOS:5120, Regression & ANOVA in Health Sciences: Correlation, simple and multiple linear regression, confounding, interactions, model selection, single and multiple factor ANOVA (analysis of variance) models, contrasts, multiple comparisons, nested and block designs, and an introduction to mixed models; designed for non-biostatistics majors. Offered spring semesters and summer sessions.
  
• BME:6225,  Communicating Science: Writing and speaking about biomedical engineering and science research; key principles of writing with clarity and cohesion; practice applying these principles on a piece of research writing students are currently working on; review of best practices for presenting research to peers and at conferences; students share their work with peers through writing and presentations. (BME:6225 requirement only effective for students joining fall '21 or later)
  
• ENGR:7270, Engineering Ethics: Introduction to practical issues associated with being a responsible scientist; topics in responsible conduct of research in engineering and the sciences using case studies, presentations, and discussions with visiting speakers.

 

Seminar Attendance

Integral to the Translational Science Training Program is a series of lectures on this topic and all post-doctoral students on the clinical side will participate. The IIBI seminar series and the Pulmonary Research Seminar series will stress the importance of reproducible research for all trainees (pre-doc and post-doc). Both series include detailed question and answer periods and discussion time with the speaker, trainees, and faculty. Existing research studies and proposals for new research projects are presented by trainees and faculty in this forum, and experiment reproducibility, data sharing, and publication practices are discussed and emphasized. All participants in the lung imaging training program will participate in a weekly journal club which alternates papers between topics ranging from image processing, Imaging, and targeted lung applications. Three times per year, the program will select luminaries within the fields related to lung imaging and lung imaging applications to provide grand rounds formatted presentation along with small group interactions with the trainees.