This spring, the Mayo Clinic and Illinois Alliance launched a new graduate fellowship program. The Fellowships for Technology-Based Healthcare Research will provide a unique opportunity for PhD students to work on a collaborative project between Mayo Clinic and Illinois with one year of the fellowship spent on the Mayo Clinic campus.
The fellowships are aimed at promoting collaborative translational research through development of new technologies and clinical tools that advance individualized medicine. The requirement to spend a total of one year’s worth of time on the Mayo Clinic campus, working closely with a Mayo Clinic advisor, will allow the students to get up close and personal with the real-world challenges associated with bringing individualized medicine technologies into the clinic.
Residence on the Mayo Clinic campus will also allow the students to gain access to secure data they would not otherwise be able to access at Illinois. The Mayo Clinic has identified a number of potential projects and project areas, most of which have a computation or bioinformatics focus. Current projects include large-scale community metabolic modeling, next-generation sequencing pipeline automation, and advanced analytics for prevention and prediction of complications.
Other areas of interest include, but are not limited to, point-of-care diagnostics, genomics, and tissue engineering.
Three Illinois departments—computer science, electrical and computer engineering, and bioengineering—have signed on to sponsor one year of the fellowship program for a student from each department. The CompGen Initiative, a collaborative effort at Illinois between the Coordinated Science Lab and Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology that focuses on development of new technologies to process and manage genomic data, is also sponsoring one year of the fellowships through this program.
Detailed information on how to apply for one of the fellowships can be found in the UI Graduate College Fellowship Opportunities Database or at mayoillinois.org. Applications for the first cohort of students, slated to start in the fall 2016 semester, are now under review. However, applications for the fellowship program will be accepted year-round.
Generous Gifts Support Unparalleled Student Opportunities
Several activities the Mayo Clinic and Illinois Alliance coordinates are possible because of donations to the Mayo Clinic in support of education and training. We recognize the contributions of Mrs. Phyllis Welsh Hallene to the Mayo Clinic in support of Summer Undergraduate Research Fellows from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Without Mrs. Hallene’s gift, and similar financial support, Illinois students would not reach the same heights of learning and labor in their journey to solve global health challenges.
