Raising the bar of medical excellence through an interdisciplinary education is a hallmark of the Johns Hopkins community. Core staff scientists of the NeuroTranslational Drug Discovery Program, with breadth of industrial pharmaceutical expertise, are engaged in training and teaching activities. Several postdoctoral fellows are involved in the program and enjoying hands-on training in cutting-edge drug discovery research. We also provide an independent research course for Hopkins’ undergraduate students poised to work on the frontier of drug discovery research. In the summer, our lab gets more crowded with both college and high school interns who are fascinated by drug discovery research at the intersection of chemistry and biology. In our first two years of operation, we have had 12 students and post doctoral fellows train in our drug discovery laboratories.
The NeuroTranslational Drug Discovery Program has also initiated several educational courses and workshops focused on drug discovery. We coordinated a new graduate-level 14-week drug discovery research course covering a wide range of topics from medicinal chemistry to intellectual property management.
The BSi and Carey School of Business co-sponsored a post doc workshop on global drug discovery, development and neurotranslation in April 2010. Panel discussions on research strategies featured experts from higher education, private industry and legal professionals. In October 2011, the BSi hosted the first national conference on academic drug discovery, “Drug Discovery in Academia: The New Paradigm for Drug Discovery”. The conference brought together many of the prominent academic drug discovery centers and pharma companies to discuss how the entities can strategically work together.
