Study partnership

The programme, started as a pilot initiative in October 2002, allows students to register, study and submit for PhDs at Cambridge but receive co-supervision at both Cambridge and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the USA.

PhD students benefit from this partnership by having access to both the facilities of the NIH as well as those in the University, with students spending approximately half of their study time at each institution.

The aim of the programme, which now includes staff and students from the University of Oxford, is to promote ground-breaking research in fundamental areas of biology and medicine that could lead to a better understanding of the natural world as well as provide new diagnosis and treatment of human disease in the future.

On its inception, the programme was focused mainly upon research opportunities in the School of Clinical Medicine. While this is still predominantly the case, the success and popularity of the programme, with staff and students alike, has seen recent students accepted from non-clinical departments including the Department of Physics and the Computer Laboratory.

"Both partners have a shared interest in fostering collaborative research in mutual areas of excellence at our institutions and a common interest in educating highly talented individuals for careers as professional scientists," says the academic co-ordinator for the programme, Professor Barbara Sahakian of the University's Department of Psychiatry.

More than 150 staff and students from the University, the NIH and the University of Oxford attended the day, which consisted of presentations and poster displays from the current programme members. To mark the inaugural Cambridge Colloquium, an evening reception at Downing College was held, which included an after-dinner talk from the Medical Research Council's Sir Greg Winter, one of the pioneers of protein and antibody engineering and a founder of Cambridge Antibody Technology.