Post-Doctoral Fellowship: Tissue Engineering

Attention: C. Herd

Two postdoc positions are currently open. For consideration, submit your CV, research interest statement, and 3 letters of recommendation.

Below is a quick descriptor of the program. Attached are the calls for application.

The Postdoctoral Fellowship Program represents the most advanced of all PTEI educational programs. By its nature, tissue engineering (TE) requires a highly interdisciplinary environment, which makes an ideal training ground for the tissue engineers of the future. The Postdoctoral Fellowship Program is of prime importance to the mission of PTEI, because it is often the final educational experience prior to a trainee’s independent scientific career and thus is a critical link between academic research laboratories and the larger world of independent academic research and commercialized biotechnology. The Fellowship Program began in January 2000. Both local foundation and federal funding have provided initial funding. Effective September 30, 2002, PTEI was awarded a 5-year, 1.1 million grant from the United States Department of Health and Human Services’ National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering to support postdoctoral training in musculoskeletal tissue engineering for research in medicine and surgery. The Program draws upon experienced mentors from the PTEI-supported institutions and is unique in that each fellow is assigned a primary and a secondary mentor, chosen from the member institutions and based on the correspondence between the mentors’ expertise and the fellows’ prior training and desired focus within tissue engineering. The mentors include M.D.s, D.M.D.s, D.D.S.s, Ph.D.s, and individuals with dual degrees.

Participants receive individualized training, encompassing relevant course work and laboratory experiences at PTEI’s affiliate research institutions. The fellowship is two years in length, with an optional third year if the mentors and fellow agree, and providing ongoing funding is arranged. The fellowship is based on a preceptorship model – each fellow is assigned to a primary and a secondary mentor. The fellows participate in selecting the sequence and sites for their training, and are enrolled in a technology commercialization and intellectual property course through Carnegie Mellon University. The remarkable interdisciplinary nature of TE provides the strong driving force for establishing a highly coordinated research training experience. Mentoring teams recognize the essential nature and value of the multidisciplinary research experience. With our Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, we continue to develop a formal mechanism through which the breadth of structural TE possibilities can be exploited.

For more information on the Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, contact Joan F. Schanck, MPA, Director of Education, at 412-235-5122 or email: jschanck@ptei.org