The Program
The Burroughs Wellcome Fund Inter-school Training Program in Chronic Diseases (BWF-CHIP), directed by Dr. Beate Ritz (Epidemiology) and Dr. Thomas Drake (Pathology and Laboratory Medicine), provides training in laboratory and population sciences to integrate research along the entire continuum from molecules to populations.
Chronic diseases are the number one epidemic of our time in Western Nations and are gaining importance in low resource countries. The etiologic complexity of chronic diseases require a multidisciplinary approach that goes beyond simply translating epidemiologic, basic science, and genetic discoveries into clinical and public health practice.
With a team of outstanding UCLA researchers and educators at the cutting edge of their research, the program harnesses major advances in biomedical, genetic, and population sciences and focuses on integration of these approaches. By providing foundational training and research experience in basic, clinical, and population-based approaches, trainees are being prepared to integrate population-based quantitative sciences with laboratory based biological sciences to effectively lead cross-disciplinary studies of the future.
The BWF-CHIP Training Program is open to all UCLA graduate students (PhD, MD) who seek to apply advanced genomic, molecular, population-based, and quantitative methods to the study of disease distribution in human populations. Acceptance into this program will provide trainees in this area of research with the foundational quantitative and laboratory knowledge to enable important interdisciplinary research in chronic diseases. This program provides up to two years of support for UCLA fees and tuition, in addition to stipend support at a rate comparable to those set by NIH or NSF.