Our program requires that all doctoral students participate in at least one journal club every semester. Journal clubs are a traditional activity in research departments and are one of the important places where you learn about a field.
Faculty, post-docs, and graduate students with common research interests meet weekly to hear a discussion of a recent journal article. Although the specific topics covered change rapidly as the participants choose new areas to focus on, there are long-standing journal clubs in areas such as:
- Protein folding & stability
- Nucleic acid-protein interactions
- Eukaryotic transcription
- Biological membranes
- Macromolecular folding & design
Seminar
Every Wednesday afternoon, the department hosts a seminar speaker invited by the faculty or the students. The seminar program allows us to have internationally recognized experts share their latest research findings. We have a great tradition in that after the seminar, the graduate students and post-doctoral scientists meet with the speaker at a local cafe for refreshments and conversation.
The post-seminar gatherings are a nice way for students to hone their networking skills with prominent scientists in an intimate and personal setting. The breadth of our faculty means that we get seminar speakers who span the frontiers of biochemistry. Because Texas A&M is in the top 10 universities in the country in terms of total research funding, interesting seminars are offered somewhere on campus every day of the week, including seminar programs in biology, chemistry, and genetics.