The application for graduate student s is available online. Students who apply to the Medical Information Science program will automatically be considered for both the MIS training grant and the genome training grant. Others should be sure to send me a copy of their application in the January-February time frame, along with a letter explaining which departments they have applied to, so we can coordinate the process. They can then select an informatics laboratory for their PhD. Students can also apply to the MD program and, either simultaneously or during first year of MD training, apply to the PhD program of their choice. Although this is not mandatory, the MSTP program is sufficiently competitive that the most successful applicants will have a strong undergraduate experience in their chosen field, and evidence of long term committment to the field.
Undergraduates can contact interested faculty investigators.
It is usually important to spend one or two quarters of research with a faculty member before a summer position can be secured, in order to ensure that the PI and the student are compatible. Undergraduates from both biology and computer science have participated in bioinformatics research at Stanford profitably with significant contributions and publishable results. It is appropriate to consider bioinformatics for a biology honors thesis, as well as for a computer science programming project. The issue of post-docs is tricky in informatics. Some people have done PhD's in computer science or biology or related field, but have not worked within the intersection of the two fields, and thus are not really qualified to do independent work in bioinformatics.