Achievement

Each of UC Riverside’s ChemGen IGERT trainees received mentoring from a UC Riverside professor in a second discipline. This was initiated in a ten-week full-immersion rotation, typically early in the second year of the PhD program of each trainee. For example, biologists learned to synthesize organic compounds or make protein-compound interaction predictions, computational scientists learned to perform a compound screen on plants, analytical chemists learned plant physiology. In numerous cases, the second faculty mentor became a member of the trainee’s dissertation committee. Some students functioned as members of two research groups. The number of trainees acknowledging assistance and/or co-authorships on IGERT trainee publications/presentations (>60%) in our external survey exemplifies the strength of interdisciplinary rotations.