NIH Training Opportunities

NIH Graduate Partnerships Program

The Graduate Partnerships Program (GPP) links the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to national and international universities in the training of graduate students. You get the best of both worlds: the academic environment of a university and the breadth and depth of research at the NIH. A different kind of graduate experience emerges, one that focuses on training the next generation of scientific leaders by accelerating communication and collaboration skills.

Individual Partnerships

Graduate students currently enrolled in a Ph.D. Training program come to NIH laboratories to enhance their dissertation research by developing an individual partnership. Many of the individual partnership students come to the NIH because they learned about the various opportunities through existing collaborations between their university mentor and an NIH faculty member. Other students discover the NIH independently of their university mentor because of the availability of research resources at the NIH. Currently, there are graduate students in partnerships with more than 100 national and international universities.

The first step in arranging an individual partnership is to discuss the possibility of performing dissertation research within the NIH intramural research program—the NIDCR—along with your MUSC mentor and department. You must obtain permission from your department to perform dissertation research at the NIH. The next step is to identify an NIH investigator willing to host you in his/her laboratory for dissertation research. Then the GPP will assist in the logistical aspects for you to go to the NIH campus for training.