"The Waksman Insititute takes an active role in supporting the educational mission of Rutgers University through the teaching and training of students at the undergratuate, graduate and high school levels."
Undergraduate Study
The faculty at the Waksman Institute train undergraduate students from departments in the School of Arts and Sciences (SAS) and the School of Envrionmental and Biological Sciences (SEBS). The institute has renovated a state of the art molecular biology research laboratory solely for the purpose of training undergraduates.
Most of the faculty take the students into their laboratories to perform independent research projects thorugh the summer and academic year. Many of these students go on to receive the Waksman Undergraduate Research Fellowship to support their research efforts. Some of these students have presented their work at scientific meetings or published their research in peer reviewed journals. Most students have entered top tier medical or graduate schools or obtained research positions at pharmaceutical companies after graduation.
Graduate Study
Students from a wide range of graduate programs at Rutgers University conduct their PhD or MS dissertation research projects with faculty at the Waksman Institute. Graduate students working with faculty at the Waksman Insititute are eligible for the Busch Graduate Fellowship Program to support their thesis research.
Core PhD courses for the Molecular Biosciences Program, along with numerous upper level lecture and seminar coursses, are taught at the Waksman Institute each semester. Waksman faculty are involved with teaching many of these course, serving on preliminary and thesis exams, and as program directors.
Outreach
The Waksman Student Scholars Program (WSSP) is an outreach program to engage high school students and their teachers in a genuine molecular biology research project. There is a one month summer program where a teacher and two students attend the Waksman Institute to learn and conduct a research project in molecular biology.
Teachers and students continue the research project during the academic year with the help of additional students. Over the past 14 years, more than 2,000 groups from about 40 New Jersey high schools have participated in the WSSP. In last two years, the Student Scholars program has analyzed mre than 600 DNA sequences and published many of these sequences at GenBank — the international sequence database.