Welcome to the Interdisciplinary PhD Program in Genetics at the University of Iowa. This program is designed for PhD students who want to receive robust training in the frontiers of Genetics research and to become leaders in meeting the upcoming challenges of genetic questions in biology, medicine, evolution and bioinformatics. Our goal is to enhance our students in their path to becoming top leaders in Genetics. To facilitate this goal, we emphasize a balanced curriculum, developing independent critical thinking skills, research excellence and productivity, collaboration, and scientific integrity.

The Interdisciplinary PhD Program in Genetics was established over 45 years ago to unite the mission of faculty with diverse interests and approaches in Genetics across campus into a cohesive interdisciplinary Genetics graduate training program. In early years, interdisciplinary activities were facilitated by an NSF Centers of Excellence grant, and support by NIH grants for over 40 years has allowed us to implement several cutting edge activities to enhance the training experience of our students.

With the rapid advances in Genetics, the program has grown to about 40 PhD students and over 70 faculty from 18 departments in 4 colleges at the University of Iowa studying all fields of modern genetics. In addition to the standard track in Genetics, our students can also choose the Computational Genetics subtrack to develop strength both in biological aspects of genetics and in the computational analysis of genetic and genomic datasets. Thus students can follow their interests to become experts in any of these areas within the broad discipline of Genetics, and gain exposure to the breadth and diversity of the field. Graduates from our program have been extremely successful in filling a growing niche in contemporary Genetics.

We hope our website will help answer your questions about the Interdisciplinary PhD Program in Genetics. Please contact us if you want to explore further how our program can help you achieve your goals.

Sincerely,

Dan Eberl
Director, Interdisciplinary PhD Program in Genetics