Overview

The primary educational activity of the Department is the Clinical Research Training Program. Designed primarily for clinical fellows at Duke who are training for academic careers, the program is now also offered at two distant sites by means of videoconferencing and web-based instruction. The training program has been offered to clinical fellows and other health professionals at the National Institutes of Health since the fall of 1998. A degree track in the program leads to a Master of Health Sciences in Clinical Research, a professional degree awarded by the School of Medicine. More than fifty new degree candidates at the three sites began the program this year. The Clinical Research Training Program can serve as a model for formalized academic training for physicians and other health professionals in other disciplines.

The department has now begun the task of developing a proposal for a PhD program in Biostatistics, which we anticipate will be submitted to the Medical School in the fall of 2006.

B&B faculty play a major role in the University’s Computational Biology and Bioinformatics PhD program, teaching a majority of its core courses, serving on its executive committee, its admissions and curriculum committees, and training a larger proportion of its PhD students than any other department. The program’s first director was a member of B&B.