The Interfaces Graduate Training Program
at UC San Diego

Established in 2005 to bring together faculty and students from the biological, engineering, physical, and health sciences disciplines, the program provides unique, interdisciplinary, graduate training at the interfaces between these fields of study. The training program has been made possible with the support of grants from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) and the National Institute for Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

The program's goals are:

• Focused collaboration across participating degree programs at UC San Diego to train a new generation of cross-disciplinary scientists.
• State-of-the-art interdisciplinary training through a technology-centered, hands-on, graduate laboratory course curriculum.
• Novel emphasis on research aimed at integrative and quantitative analysis across multiple scales of biological organization from molecule to organism in health and disease.

Supporting the mission of NIBIB:

Students' chosen research project must support the mission of the NIBIB, which is to transform through engineering the understanding of disease and its prevention, detection, diagnosis, and treatment. NIBIB-supported research has pioneered groundbreaking advances to create technologies that are essential to extending the health span, by personalizing diagnosis and treatment and significantly improving quality of life. As the hub at NIH for expanding technologies across diseases and disorders, NIBIB support is driving research to benefit patients and healthcare professionals and promote further biomedical discovery.

Announcements

Interfaces Information Session
April 9, 2025 – 2:00 p.m.
Learn about the Interaces Graduate Training Program, funding opportunities, and the Admissions process. RSVP here, Zoom link here.

Student Seminar 
March 21, 2025 – 1:00 – 2:00 p.m.
PFBH Zweifach Library, Room 489
Interfaces-NIBIB T32 Faculty Member Dr.  Padmini Rangamani will offer a workshop on strategic planning and time management. Lunch provided, RSVP. 

Interfaces-NIBIB T32 Faculty Member, Dr. Samuel Ward, appointed Vice Dean for Research at School of Medicine.

Interfaces-NIBIB T32 Faculty Members, Dr. Gert Cauwenberghs and Dr. Takaki Komiyama, contributed to an interdisciplinary effort by assisting a UCSD JSOE team that was awarded a $5 million grant from the NIH to develop next-generation brain implants that can record brain activity with unprecedented resolution and speed across different brain regions.

Student Seminar
January 31, 2025 – 1:00 – 2:00 p.m. 
PFBH Zweifach Library, Room 489
USPTO Patent Examiner and UCSD alumna Dr. Sophia Hirakis, "Leveraging the Interfaces Graduate Training Program in your Graduate Training and Beyond." 

Email announcements will be issued prior to each Student Seminar.

Contact interfaces@ucsd.edu for more information.