The National Institutes of Health
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is the primary source of biomedical research support in the United States.  The NIH conducts cutting edge research and training on its own campuses and fosters research and research training at universities around the U.S.  The mission of NIH covers the full spectrum of science, from discovery of new fundamental knowledge about living systems to applying knowledge to improve health and fight disease.  Until recently, the ground-breaking research laboratories on the NIH campuses have not been easily accessible to graduate students, but the Graduate Partnerships Program has changed that!

The main NIH campus in Bethesda, Maryland, is one of the largest and most recognized centers of biomedical research in the world.  The 300 acre campus, located near the heart of the Washington, DC, metropolitan area, employs more than 19,000 people dedicated to advances in science.  Almost 1300 primary research scientists lead their research teams of postdoctoral fellows, students and technical support as do university faculty in traditional graduate programs.  As a research institute, each NIH investigator is provided with a substantial operating budget rather than writing grants to fund their research.  The 2004 budget for the research programs on the NIH campuses was over $2.6 billion, a level of support that enables rapid progress on the most important and exciting research questions.  Technical and human resources seldom limit the creativity and new approaches you can apply to novel research questions.
 
Why consider NIH for graduate studies?
Until recently, the only graduate students able to take advantage of the incredible research resources of NIH did so through informal arrangements between their home graduate school and an NIH scientist.  In the late 1990s, the leadership of NIH recognized that this important national resource was woefully underutilized in the preparation of the “next generation” of biomedical scientists.  The Graduate Partnerships Program (GPP) was crafted to take advantage of the best of both worlds – the academic environment of highly respected universities and the breadth and depth of research at NIH.  But the goal has not been to create 'just another graduate school' to mimic the many excellent university programs to choose from.  The goal is to create a different kind of graduate experience, one which purposefully focuses on skills of the future scientist and how discoveries will be made in the decades ahead.

How will science and research be different in the future? 
The volume and type of knowledge being discovered each day is leading to a new generation of integrative science.  Although there are still limitless new details to be discovered, biomedical science has reached an era where:

• questions can now be asked that require integration of data and strategies across laboratories, disciplines and continents - interdisciplinary research!
• lab scientists and clinical investigators work together to apply the steady stream of new information to clinical problems
• basic scientists need to know how their information applies across populations and genetic heterogeneity

All of this will require the scientist of the future to understand and work with a broader array of topics, methods and collaborators.  Creating these “new” investigators is the mission of the GPP.  With over 300 current students and plans to grow to 500 within a few years, the NIH is rapidly becoming one of the premier graduate training environments for scientists of the future.