Achievement

A second outcome has been the opportunity to learn state of the art approaches with access to researchers developing new molecular and computational tools. Because we charge the trainees with the task of defining the specific project they will pursue, the curriculum needs to provide enough basic foundation material, yet remain flexible to accommodate a wide range of possible research topics. This year, the project the trainees chose to purse was not feasible on a whole-genome scale, and warranted a different approach. We uncovered a new publication (published 4 months earlier) that provided a powerful approach to their research questions. We were able to bring the author to Brown for a lecture and discussion of the method, and the trainees remained in contact with the author in learning computational analyses related to their specific project. This flexibility provides added value to the Core Course that would not be available in fixed curriculum.