Bioengineering question

[metacurious]

Hey guys, new here to the forum. I'm a graduating medical student who will be pursuing an oncology related residency. I'm interested in doing a PhD in BioE am trying to evaluate programs that might be a good match. I'm interested in nanotechnology and cancer therapy, so a researcher doing work on nanoscale drug delivery systems for example would be nice fit. I've been trying to search for labs online but there are so many programs and so many labs that its hard to filter out the more translational cancer projects. Anyone have any input?

[eklavya]

One of my friends is in last year of his chemical engineering (BS), and he is also interested in something along your way. He told me that he is going to apply to Yale, UWisc (Madison) and JHopkins as his top prospects. Perhaps this will lead ways for you.

Another way to find labs related to your interest is by reading papers. Try finding papers published within a couple of years or so and see which labs they come from. This is probably the best way to go, as then you could really, really narrow down your search to few labs that work on your focus area.

[waddle]

Have you asked the folks over at the StudentDoctor Network forums? If you're looking for translational research, especially post-MD, that might be a good place to ask for advice--the biomedical science folks here seem to be more focused on basic work without a clinical background. (Sorry if I'm misreading your post; I'm not sure whether you want to do translational work or just pure benchwork.) That said, bhikhaari's advice is sound for beginning to search for research groups (looking in Nature, Science, PNAS, Cell, etc. would be a starting point). Good luck!

Edited December 6, 2010 by waddle

[metacurious]

Thanks for the responses. I'm most interested in doing basic work on a topic that's clinically relevant (e.g. investigating new molecular therapies, be it siRNA 'bombs' / nanofabricated devices / etc for pancreatic/brain cancer). That's sort of what I meant by "translational." I'm debating whether a Bioengineering PhD or Biochem/Molecular physics PhD would be more appropriate for this sort of work. I realize this could fall under the umbrella of "biology" as well, but I'm very interested in taking courses on nanomedicine, biomedical device development, etc. as well because I hope to one day be involved on the industry side as well and they tend to value the more technical degrees.

When I browsed through various programs it's clear that some are hard-core engineering focused, with very few clinically relevant projects, while some are more clinical. I think I will begin to look in the big journals for a match, but in the meanwhile I'd love to take suggestions if anyone knows a place that aligns well with my interests. SDN is largely unhelpful for research-related discussions...Thanks.

[psycholinguist]

I've heard good things about Christopher Voigt's lab at UCSF, and the person I know there has interests fairly similar to yours. (I hear they're about to move to MIT, though.)