Overview

Academic advising by our faculty is a critical component of our graduate students' education.

All matriculating students will be assigned a faculty advisor from the group of CORE FACULTY to help them design their academic program. Students will remain with this advisor throughout the program unless they, with their advisor's approval, develop other arrangements for advising with our core faculty.

Students should meet with advisors within the first quarter of each year to discuss students' curricular and research plans.

Each student will propose a thesis committee, to be approved by the Program Director, comprised of at least two faculty members associated with the Master's degree program, one of whom must be a core faculty member, and the second must be either core or affiliated faculty.  The chair of the thesis committee will be the student's primary faculty advisor, and a member of the core faculty.  All committee members must read and approve the final thesis.  Depending on the topic of the project, additional faculty members may serve as mentors either as a committee member or in a less formal arrangement.  Other faculty members may be added to the thesis to serve as "content experts" for projects concerned with specific diseases or medical treatments.

Each student will submit a 1-2 page thesis proposal by the end of the first year in the program. The proposal should describe the research project which will fulfill the requirement for the master’s thesis including identifying the research question and describing the data sources and methods which will be used. For collaborative projects, the student should identify the collaborators and describe in detail his or her role on the project. For projects using secondary data, the student should provide evidence that the data will be available for the proposed research and describe how he or she will access the data. In the proposal, the student should identify the members of the thesis committee.

Funding of Graduate Studies