Victor J. Dzau, M.D., chancellor for health affairs for Duke University, has announced a new Chancellor’s Scholarship that will provide $1.6 million in funding for biomedical graduate students who are not eligible for support on National Institutes of Health (NIH) training grants, including outstanding international applicants.

The Chancellor’s Scholarship will also award a limited number of one-time merit supplements to especially talented domestic graduate students to augment their NIH-funded stipends.

“Until now, there has been very limited financial support available for outstanding graduate students applying from outside of the U.S. Increasingly, international students are becoming an important pipeline of outstanding young scientists at Duke and in the U.S. This new scholarship program will allow Duke to tap this vital resource and to attract and reward our most distinguished domestic applicants, too,” said Dzau.

The new program is the result of a recommendation from the Science Advisory Council, formed by Dzau in December 2006 to generate ideas on how to strengthen Duke Medicine’s science and research efforts. The scholarship initiative also supports Duke Medicine’s vision of globalization.

“When we first met to identify ways that the institution and Dr. Dzau could help strengthen science and research here in the long-term, an overwhelming priority was to find a way to improve graduate programs’ access to the best applicants, and in particular to international applicants,” said Sally Kornbluth, Ph.D., vice dean for basic science and a professor of pharmacology and cancer biology. “We’ve all seen applications or inquiries from great students whom we couldn’t accept because we couldn’t support them.”

International students are ineligible for the federal grants, largely from the National Institutes of Health, that provide tuition and stipends for domestic graduate students in the sciences. And as NIH budgets have gotten smaller in recent years, School of Medicine departments have found it more difficult to accommodate some of even the most well-qualified, would-be doctoral students.

The Chancellor’s Scholarship will begin as a pilot program, to run in the 2008-2009 and 2009-2010 academic years. It will enable the School of Medicine to admit 20 additional biomedical graduate students over three years.

“Graduate students are the bread and butter of a research laboratory -- they not only enrich a lab with their youthful enthusiasm, but a truly gifted student brings a lot of creativity and frequently a new perspective to a research problem,” said Paul Modrich, Ph.D., James B. Duke professor of biochemistry and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. “The Chancellor’s Scholarship program will provide a refreshing solution to problems of graduate student support and will make Duke more competitive for the best graduate students, both domestic and foreign.”

Dzau has asked biomedical graduate programs within the school to nominate up to three international applicants and three domestic students, highlighting their academic strengths and scientific value to the respective program. Deadline for nominations is February 25, 2008. A selection committee composed of graduate faculty drawn from departments throughout the school will select the top candidates.

Programs eligible to nominate students are biochemistry, cell and molecular biology, developmental biology, genetics and genomics, immunology, molecular cancer biology, neurobiology, molecular genetics and microbiology, pathology, integrated toxicology, pharmacology, structural biology and biophysics, and computational biology and bioinformatics.

In addition to award money, recipients of the Chancellor’s Scholarship will be invited to an annual Chancellor’s Scholars dinner.