Bar Harbor, Maine – The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) has made a four-year, $1.6 million grant to The Jackson Laboratory (JAX) to expand its course offerings in mammalian genetics, genomics and associated technologies.
The new funding will support courses at the JAX headquarters campus in Bar Harbor, Maine and The Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine in Farmington, Conn., targeting graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and professional scientists.
JAX Vice President for Education Thomas Litwin, Ph.D., comments, “As the pace of discovery and technology development increases, so does the need for scientist education. With cutting-edge research, an internationally recognized faculty, and the new JAX Genomic Medicine campus, we are well positioned to creatively expand our advanced courses program to better serve the research community.”
The HHMI grant will fund courses in a range of areas, including structural variants in the human genome, mouse genetics, analysis of mammalian microbiomes and behavioral analysis. One program will train professors from smaller colleges and regional universities in order to enhance their ability to integrate big data genomics into their undergraduate courses.
Under the grant, JAX will also expand its outreach efforts to enroll underrepresented students in its advanced courses, and will build new collaborative relationships with the other institutions receiving HHMI Advanced Courses funding: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York and Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass.
HHMI plays a powerful role in advancing scientific research and education in the United States. Its scientists, located across the country and around the world, have made important discoveries that advance both human health and our fundamental understanding of biology. The Institute also aims to transform science education into a creative, interdisciplinary endeavor that reflects the excitement of real research. HHMI has an endowment of approximately $19 billion. Its headquarters are located in Chevy Chase, Maryland, just outside Washington, D.C.
JAX is an independent, nonprofit biomedical research institution and National Cancer Institute-designated Cancer Center with 50 principal investigators and more than 1,700 employees. Its mission is to discover precise genomic solutions for disease and empower the global biomedical community in the shared quest to improve human health.
The Laboratory’s commitment to education ranges from high school summer programs to postdoctoral training and a growing roster of courses, conferences, workshops, clinical online training and webinars that further the education of practicing scientists and professionals.