Groundbreaking Translational Biology, Medicine, and Health Graduate Program marks decade of transdisciplinary education

Ubadah Sabbagh had more than neuroscience on his mind when he joined Translational Biology, Medicine, and Health (TBMH) Graduate Program in 2016.

He’d left his native Syria in the midst of a civil war a few years earlier to attend college at the University of Missouri and hadn’t seen his family since. The war continued.

But in the TBMH program, and at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC in Roanoke, where he conducted his doctoral research, Sabbagh found what he needed to press on towards his life goals.

“Honestly, I think that this program is very unique in the kind of support and infrastructure and resources it provides because any time there were major challenges, there were people who were willing to help you solve them,” he said. “It’s a wonderful community, very interdisciplinary and very diverse, in terms of demographics and in terms of sciences. All of that I think prepared me pretty well to go anywhere.”

Sabbagh didn’t go just anywhere. Funded by a prestigious National Institutes of Health award to support his transition from pre-doctoral to postdoctoral research, he landed a job as a postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Sabbagh was back at the program’s headquarters on Virginia Tech’s Health Sciences and Technology campus in Roanoke in August, helping TBMH celebrate its 10th anniversary. He joined fellow alumni at a weekend of events, ending with a symposium where he spoke along with five fellow graduates.

Sabbagh is one of 90 TBMH alumni, and one of 79 with doctoral degrees. Others are spread across the biomedical industry, public health institutions, policy centers, and academic institutions including Harvard, Emory University, University of California, Berkeley, and University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill.

Sabbagh’s NIH grant counts among more than $2 million TBMH students have earned to support their research, including more than 30 prestigious grants from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the American Heart Association.

Those are but two measures of the quick success of a program that set out to do things differently from the outset by emphasizing transdisciplinary learning and research, and moving science from the laboratory to the world, including the clinic, the corporate boardroom community and the halls of policy-making.

“We wanted to build a new curriculum that integrated translational science into each aspect, so that no matter which disciplines our students decided to go into, they all know how discoveries translate out into therapies,” said Audra Van Wart, TBMH’s founding co-director, and now associate dean of training, education, and professional development and director of postdoctoral affairs at Brown University. “It's really not a graduate program that was like other programs that had been offered at Virginia Tech, and even across the country.”

At the time, the Virginia Tech’s Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC in Roanoke was in its first few years of existence, with a small but growing number of research labs.

“It was very apparent that a major part of the success for Virginia Tech reaching its goal to develop a world-class health sciences enterprise including a major increase in NIH funding and to achieve global distinction would be an innovative graduate program,” said Michael Friedlander, executive director of the research institute and Virginia Tech’s vice president for Health Sciences and Technology and founding co-director of the TBMH program. “We wanted to expand into the greater health sciences, attract bright creative students who were hungry to make a real difference in the health sciences enterprise and to serve the needs of the growing science research community.”

They sought a model that differentiated itself from single-discipline graduate programs.

“We have students in the life sciences and physical sciences and social sciences, and engineering as well,” Friedlander said. “And they teach each other as much as the faculty teach them, because they have these different experiences and ways to approach problems related to biomedical science.”

TBMH students choose from five focus areas, including cancer, immunity and infectious disease, public health and implementation science, molecular and cognitive neuroscience, and metabolic and cardiovascular science. They take core classes, rotate through multiple labs, conduct research in each, and settle into a lab where they’ll stay while in the program.

The students work in labs across the university, including the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute in Roanoke, where TBMH is headquartered, in various colleges on the main Blacksburg campus, at Carilion Clinic, and at the research institute’s labs on the Children’s National Research and Innovation Campus in Washington, D.C.

This year, 91 students are enrolled, with all but a few seeking doctoral degrees. The program has also partnered with the Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine to offer students a path to completing both a medical degree and a Ph.D.

Medical students work in many of the same labs as TBMH students.

“The individuals who are doing the research are rubbing shoulders with the people who will be delivering the therapies based on that research,” said Steven Poelzing, the program’s second and longest-serving director. Poelzing, a professor at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute, recently handed over leadership of TBMH to John Chappell, associate professor at the research institute.

“We’ve developed a tightly identified program with clear benchmarks of what makes us different,” Poelzing said. “One of the things that I'm most proud about is the number of our students who are competing for national awards, which is higher than any graduate program I've ever seen claim.”

The still relatively small program has proved plenty big for its students.

“I never felt like it was too small to learn, and it definitely prepared me for the wider world,” said Rachel Padgett, a 2022 graduate and now a postdoctoral fellow for biopharmaceutical company Cytokinetics Inc.

“TBMH just made me into a much more well-rounded person,” she added. “The emphasis and support for values of education, science, community and leadership, I think they just nurture all of that in us.”

Kisha Greer was one of TBMH’s early students, and wasn’t sure about whether she belonged in a program to study biomedical research.

“The impostor syndrome seeps into you constantly,” she said. “But what I learned in this program is that interdisciplinary programs like TBMH are always going to be better than ones that are solely focused on one thing.”

Greer earned her doctorate in 2019, and transformed her basic research skills and discoveries into a full-time science communications career with Syneos Health. It’s a career path she loves and for which she says the TBMH program prepared her well.

TBMH introduced her to the idea that you can do a vast range of things with a post-graduate degree in science, she said.

Van Wart, who was back in Roanoke for the 10th anniversary, was awed by the success of students from her founding years with the program and those who came after.

“I’m really proud of our students, and to see all of the things that they're doing right now,” she said.

“It’s great to see the first 10 years represented here,” echoed Friedlander. “The next 10 years will be even better.”