Co-Directors
Steering Committee:
December 2012: David Keifer (M. Jarrold Lab), Andy Johnson (Carlson Lab) and Anna Weber (Baker Lab) have been selected to receive the QCB graduate fellowship. These fellowships become effective January 1, 2013 for a two-year period. Congratulations David, Andy and Anna!
August 2012: The QCB training faculty welcome the addition of four new trainers. They are Nikki Pohl, Carmack Chair in Bioorganic Chemistry, and three new Assistant Professors, Jared Cochran (Biochemistry), Megan Thielges (Chemistry) and Yan Yu (Chemistry). Nikki Pohl joins David Giedroc as co-Directors of the Program
December 2011: Lizz Siegel (M. Jarrold Lab), Zach Harms (Jacobson Lab) and Andrey Malyutin (Dragnea Lab) have been selected to receive the QCB graduate fellowship. This fellowship will provide funding for a one- two year period and is effective staring January 1, 2012. Congratulations Lizz, Zachary and Andrey!
October 2011: Professor Erin Carlson has received the NIH Director's New Innovator Award which will provide $1.5 million to support her work to develop improved treatments for drug-resistant infections.
QCB at IU
Major advances in biomedicine and human health will be increasingly dependent on scientists that are trained to understand the chemical logic of biological systems in physical and quantitative terms. Training in Quantitative and Chemical Biology (QCB) accomplishes exactly this. At Indiana University, QCB is unique in that it seeks to link our renowned expertise in mass spectrometry with world-class research faculty and facilities in nanocharacterization and nanofluidics, chemical synthesis, biophysical chemistry and structural biology.
Mission
Our mission is to foster a community of chemical, physical and life scientists to develop and utilize leading-edge technologies to explore biological problems important in human health and disease.
Instrumentation
QCB faculty and students enjoy access to a remarkable collection of sophisticated instrumentation including a state-of-the-art nanofabrication and characterization facility, a 300 keV cryo-transmission electron microscope, 800 and 600 MHz NMR spectrometers with cryoprobe systems and a modern x-ray crystallography core equipped with a sample preparation robot. In addition, the Light Microscopy and Imaging Center houses a super-resolution DeltaVision|OMX light microscope, one of the few sited in the country.
This instrumentation coupled with myriad high resolution mass spectrometers used for proteomics, glycomics and metabolomics in the Biomolecular Mass Spectrometry Laboratory (site coming soon) and a soon-to-be-established in Waters Corporation Center for Innovation, make the Bloomington campus an outstanding venue in which to obtain interdisciplinary graduate training in QCB.
QCB Fellowships
One- and two-year QCB Graduate Training Fellowships are competitively awarded to third and second-year students, respectively, working on projects at the interface and are currently underwritten by the College of Arts and Sciences. Lizz Seigal (Jarrold lab), Zach Harms (Jacobson lab) and Andrey Malyutin (Dragnea lab) were selected as the second round of fellows, who follow on the footsteps of inaugural fellows John Lisher (Giedroc lab) and Kaelyn Wilke (Carlson lab) awarded in 2010.
A third round of fellowship competition will be held in December 2012, with awards to begin January 1, 2013 and run for one or two years. Click here to for information required to apply for a QCB fellowship.
2013 Watanabe Symposium in Biotechnology
Indiana University and QCB annually host a symposium in honor of August "Gus" Watanabe, a renowned physician, researcher and professor who led research and development at Eli Lilly and Company for nearly a decade, and who was a pioneer in the study of the cellular mechanics of the heart. Watanabe assumed the role as President of Lilly Research Laboratories in 1994 and under his guidance, Lilly launched 11 important new pharmaceutical products.
This year's event will occur on Saturday, October 12 in C122 Chemistry Building and features oral presentations by internationally recognized invited speakers, several short presentations by QCB faculty and a poster session to showcase research activities in QCB trainer laboratories.
Invited speakers this year include Helen Blackwell (University of Wisconsin-Madison), William DeGrado (University of California, San Francisco), Shahriar Mobashery (University of Notre Dame) and Thomas J. Meade (Northwestern University).
Click here for information on the 2012 event.
Click here for PDF brochures of the 2011 and 2010 events.
Curricular requirements of the QCB training program
QCB promotes the training of students from a diversity of backgrounds with undergraduate degrees in chemistry, biochemistry, biophysics or mathematics who are interested in developing a sophisticated understanding of the chemical and physical logic of biological processes.
The QCB training program is built around a set of four 1.5 credit (half-semester) courses (6 credits total). This allows a student to customize his/her graduate education by enrolling in courses most directly relevant to their research interests, but built on top of a typical core course sequence taken by students in host departments (18 credits total). If desired, successful completion of these courses can be used by the student to satisfy the university requirement for the minor in Quantitative Biology (QB).
Two 1.5 cr courses are required: 1) Chemical biology and reactivity (C687a); and 2) Computational methods and numerical analysis (TBD). These courses are designed to arm the student with a fundamental "language" that enables him/her to develop dissertation projects in interdisciplinary areas as a result of interacting with colleagues in other areas of chemistry or biology.
Students interested in the program enter graduate school in one of the existing degree-granting programs at IU, i.e., Chemistry, Biology, Physics or the Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Biochemistry.
