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Overview
Graduate Education in the Life Sciences at Cornell
 Graduate education at Cornell is organized by Fields. Almost all
Fields have an administrative home in a department. In some cases the
faculty comprising the Field are virtually the same as those comprising
the department. In other cases not all the departmental faculty are members
of a Field with a home in that department, and many outside-departmental
faculty are members. Generally each Field acts independently in graduate
student admissions, e.g. recruiting, selecting, financing, and interviewing
prospective students who visit Cornell, although in some cases Fields
recruit together. In
the case of the BMCB Field, the Department of
Molecular Biology & Genetics serves as the administrative
home department.
The Field of BMCB
Viewed broadly, the research focus of the Field of BMCB is to uncover
the fundamental chemical, biochemical, molecular biological, and cell
biological principles that govern all forms of life. While the techniques
and principles of "biochemistry", "molecular biology",
and "cell
biology" underlie much of the basic and applied research in modern biology
and in medicine, research in BMCB labs goes beyond the methodologies
implied by these terms. BMCB research typically is devoted to understanding
the processes common to all cells, such as transcription, translation,
DNA replication and repair, protein-nucleic acid interactions, biological
pathways including signal transduction and metabolism, cell-cell communication,
organelle function, macromolecular machines, protein structure and dynamics,
membrane and cytoskeleton structure and function, and enzyme mechanisms. The
research in the Field of BMCB focuses on quantitative and mechanistic
types of analysis.
The Field of BMCB enrolls about
12 - 22 PhD students per year. There are about 50 faculty in BMCB, somewhat
over one half of whom are in the Department of Molecular Biology and
Genetics (MBG) (College
of Arts and Sciences and College
of Agriculture and Life Sciences), with the rest from the following
departments or units: Chemistry
and Chemical Biology (College
of Arts and Sciences); Applied
and Engineering Physics (College
of Engineering); Physics (College
of Arts and Sciences); Division
of Nutritional Sciences (College of Agriculture
and Life Sciences and College
of Human Ecology); Microbiology (College
of Agriculture and Life Sciences); Boyce
Thompson Institute; Molecular
Medicine (College
of Veterinary Medicine), Microbiology
and Immunology (College of Veterinary Medicine), and Biomedical
Science (College of
Veterinary Medicine). New BMCB faculty members will continue to be added
in the coming years.
One hallmark of the Graduate Field of Biochemistry, Molecular and Cell Biology
is its breadth. The research areas in BMCB extend from the genetics and cell
biology of fundamental processes like mitosis and membrane trafficking, to
transcriptional regulation and DNA replication, to structural biology. A second
hallmark of BMCB is the many productive interactions and collaborations across
the entire spectrum represented by the Field, which is located intellectually
at the center of biological research at Cornell. Thus, research groups in the
Field benefit from interactions with scientists in the applied as well as the
basic sciences, both of which flourish at Cornell. Examples of cutting-edge
technologies brought to bear on biological problems by collaborations include
nanobiotechnology, genomic array studies, computational approaches, and structural
and imaging techniques. A third hallmark of the BMCB program is its size and
recognition. It is one of the largest graduate programs in the biological
sciences at Cornell University, and it has enjoyed continuous support from
the National Institutes of Health for over 30 years in the form of a pre-doctoral
student Training Grant in Cellular and Molecular Biology. Finally, a fourth
hallmark of the program is its nurturing environment for grad students.
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