History milestone: Founding of the St. Jude Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences

During the decade between the 50th anniversary of the founding of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and the 60th, one of the institution’s most significant advancements was the founding of the St. Jude Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences. The graduate school was officially organized in November 2015. The goal was to develop future leaders and innovators who will discover cures, advance treatments for catastrophic childhood diseases, and fundamentally advance global health.

While the school is young, graduate education is not new at St. Jude. Training biomedical scientists has been a key component of the hospital’s mission since the 1960s. The institution has helped to train thousands of postdoctoral fellows, medical students, clinical fellows and graduate students through affiliations with medical schools and research universities.

St. Jude President and CEO James R. Downing, MD, and the graduate school’s President and Dean Stephen White, DPhil, had been discussing the possibility of a graduate school at St. Jude since the early 2000s. They and other faculty leaders wanted to build a curriculum focused on St. Jude research goals.

The plan was ambitious: to leverage our world-class research and clinical environments, faculty, and resources to develop the next generation of leaders in research and child health. In June 2015, the St. Jude Board approved establishing the school as a separate institution. With new infrastructure and curriculum in place, the school welcomed its inaugural class of PhD students to campus in July 2017. The subsequent development of the school has been rapid. The Master of Global Child Health program launched in July 2019. A Master of Science program in Clinical Investigation was developed in July 2021.