The Sheila and David Fuente Graduate Program in Cancer Biology is a university-wide interdisciplinary training program that draws upon clinical and basic sciences from multiple departments, schools and colleges of the University of Miami.

The goal of our program is to train future scientific leaders in cancer biology by providing a multidisciplinary education and a uniquely rich training environment in cancer biology. The scientific focus is broadly cancer research with an emphasis on fundamental cellular processes and the derangement of normal pathways in cancer etiology and progression. Identification of novel diagnostics, therapeutic targets and mechanisms are major research areas.

We emphasize cross-disciplinary approaches encompassing novel concepts and state-of-the?art techniques of molecular biology, biochemistry, genetics, genomics, proteomics, structural biology, cell biology, pharmacology and molecular medicine. We integrate students into the extensive and rapidly expanding clinical and translational research programs of the?Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center?(SCCC).

We offer an innovative PhD curriculum and have established a number of goals including:

• To provide a foundation in cancer biology that demonstrates the interrelationship of biological discovery and clinical application

• To emphasize explicit training in scientific reasoning

• To provide students with two-tier mentoring. Students receive guidance from both a research mentor and a physician mentor. The research mentor is the dissertation advisor, while the physician mentor will provide the student with a clinical perspective in cancer biology including issues of diagnosis, management and treatment of cancer patients and clinical research approaches