EXPAND seeks to address central challenges by recruiting, training, and mentoring a diverse community of life sciences students with a broad intellectual platform to break down historic disciplinary silos. Broad scientific training is complemented with stage-specific professional development and exposure to a wide range of non-academic career opportunities.
 

Predicting an organism’s phenotype remains one of the central challenges of modern life science. Understanding how different scales of biological organization from the genome to the environment determine phenotypes and their consequences is a critical step in solving societal problems of human health, food security, and response to global climate change. The next generation of scientists, whether they work in academic careers or other settings, must be able to integrate and communicate their research across these scales and bring modern computational and quantitative approaches to bear on big data.

This research cluster realigns doctoral training to respond to complex societal questions regarding the phenotype by bringing together faculty and students in cell and developmental biology, neuroscience, evolution, ecology, psychology and environmental sciences.  Participants will have the opportunity to explore a variety of topics, such as forecasting how changing environments will impact the biodiversity of phenotypes and species and understanding how the production and variation of disease and resistance phenotypes affect the development of effective management and treatment strategies.  Alongside their disciplinary focus, doctoral fellows will be mentored as creative thinkers and productive collaborators across lab groups.

Life Science Graduate Programs at UVA include:

Biology PhD

Environmental Sciences PhD

Psychology PhD

Biomedical Science PhD