Graduate Admissions in the Time of COVID-19

Amynah Pradhan is the director of the graduate program in neuroscience and an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Pradhan is dedicated to fostering a supportive and collaborative environment to maximize student success. She is also committed to graduate education that promotes diversity and inclusivity. Her research endeavors are focused on understanding the role of opioid receptors in headache disorders.

Janet Clark is the director of the office of fellowship training for the National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH). In her current role, she is responsible for developing and overseeing a multidisciplinary training program in NIMH’s Intramural Research Program (IRP). In addition, she founded and served as director of the NIMH IRP Translational Neuropsychopharmacology Initiative to re-invigorate psychiatric drug discovery. Prior to joining NIMH, she was an associate professor in the pharmacology and physiology department at Drexel University College of Medicine (DUCOM), director of the pharmacology and physiology graduate program, and co-director and co-founder of the drug discovery and development graduate program. Clark started in the pharmaceutical industry where she spent 10 years at Merck Research Laboratories supporting drug discovery efforts in neuropharmacology through preclinical research.

Christopher Harvey is an associate professor in the department of neurobiology at Harvard Medical School. His research focuses on identifying principles for the function and organization of neural circuits in the mammalian cortex, with a main goal of understanding cellular, circuit, and systems-level mechanisms for decision-making during spatial navigation. Harvey has served as the chair of the admissions committee for the PhD Program in Neuroscience at Harvard University for the past four years. He is an advocate for data-driven admissions policies that reduce bias and promote inclusion to create a diverse graduate student community at Harvard.

Daniel Kerschensteiner is currently a professor of ophthalmology and visual sciences, neuroscience, and biomedical engineering at Washington University in Saint Louis. Kerschensteiner studied medicine at the Georg-August University in Göttingen, Germany. He completed his thesis at the Max-Planck Institute for Experimental Medicine and his residency in neurology in the same city. He then pursued postdoctoral training at University College London and the University of Washington in Seattle, before starting his lab at Washington University in Saint Louis. He has served on the admission committee for the neuroscience graduate program of Washington University for nine years and have been its chair for the past five.

Robert Semple is a clinician scientist based at the Center for Cardiovascular Science at the University of Edinburgh, UK, where he is dean of postgraduate research for the College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine, with oversight of admissions and progression of around 1,000 doctoral students across a variety of life science PhD programmes. Semple’s clinical and research interests center on acquired and monogenic forms of insulin resistance and insulin supersensitivity, using approaches spanning clinical trials, experimental medicine, and disease modelling in cells and animals.