Steve, Thank you for your thoughtful comments here. I guess I didn't express myself clearly with respect to the Ph.D. elements - I wasn't thinking about a formal or rigid training program - but rather some of the mechanics of departments recognizing that these approaches and the elements that we think are necessary in terms of developing thinkers in this area are recognized within and/or across departments (i.e., that a student could do a thesis primarily based in questions addressed with a Modeling and Simulation approach for example). I agree that it is critical that we developing those "who are quite capable of learning new methods on the fly and not technicians for the present". The not producing technicians is a key challenge but a critical element to success in this area. We are hoping to developing some of those folks (i.e., the faculty of the future) with the program here. Some of the sharing/vetting was more in the vein of being able to expose the students to the leaders in each of the areas of the field for perspective (perhaps additional cultivation in the context of growing).
I suppose Stephen Pinker's assessment is some cause for concern - but at the same time a stimulus to begin thinking about how to "grow" the field. The hope at Indiana is that the initial program will evolve into one that has a Ph.D. training element (and already there is significant interest from Ph.D. students in the inter-disciplinary programs here in medical genetics and pharmacology). Best Regards, Rob Robert R. Bies Pharm.D.Ph.D. Associate Professor of Clinical Pharmacology Member Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics Indiana University School of Medicine 1001 W 10th Street W7138 Indianapolis, IN 46202 -----Original Message----- From: Stephen Duffull [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Friday, October 16, 2009 7:06 AM To: Bies, Robert R.; Kimko, Holly [PRDUS]; [email protected] Cc: [email protected] Subject: RE: post-ACoP: How to train future pharmacometricians Rob I think what you indicate is perhaps more formal than what I am thinking. > across institutions - how is this vetted if one wants to provide an > "accredited" Ph.D. degree in this area - so how are the various > contributions recognized across institutions as being appropriate and > sufficient to contribute to the Ph.D. from any given institution that > is participating). There are already curricula established that could > be used to show the core need for training across multiple sites (see > the Metrum Institute curriculum - perhaps Marc can comment on this > further). The above sounds like a training programme. A PhD is about a student learning about research and problem solving in an environment that maximises their ability to discover answers/solutions. It is not about training someone up for a job somewhere. It happens that PhD students who are trained in pharmacometrics will generally get quite a broad range of experiences and knowledge of current tools. However, we are training thinking players for the future who are quite capable of learning new methods on the fly and not technicians for the present. What I hear in this discussion is more of a course taught, perhaps a Masters type, programme whereby a student could tick off the necessary components to attain the title of pharmacometrician. I don't know the attrition rates in academia in Australasia, but I imagine that we have as much difficulty either in setting up a position which is principally pharmacometrics (due to available funding) or attracting staff of the right background. Without faculty we get no PhD students and no thinking players for the future... So, for me there are essentially three different types of solutions: 1) Industry & academia grow their own pharmacometricians by taking on someone in an allied field and training them up in house (or via external courses) and then run the risk of losing them after a substantial investment. 2) A teaching programme is set up specifically to train pharmacometrics (e.g. a Masters programme of some sort). 3) More faculty become available at Universities who will take on PhD students and then train the next generation of players. I believe (1) happens now and for me (3) is the solution for the future. I believe the criterion to determine the health of the discipline is the total number of young faculty in pharmacometrics across the world. They say (at least Stephen Pinker does) that a language is officially dead when less than 6000 children speak it... Steve -- Professor Stephen Duffull Chair of Clinical Pharmacy School of Pharmacy University of Otago PO Box 913 Dunedin New Zealand E: [email protected] P: +64 3 479 5044 F: +64 3 479 7034 Design software: www.winpopt.com
