The Burroughs Wellcome Fund has announced a new institutional training program - Institutional Program Unifying Population and Laboratory Based Sciences - in the hope to develop a new cadre of scientists working at the connections between population approaches to human health and basic biomedical research.

The awards will provide $500,000 a year for five years in order to stimulate institutional training programs that partner researchers working in schools of medicine and schools or divisions of public health.

Understanding human health will be a focal priority for the programs that are funded.  The program will build on institutional strengths to achieve this focus in such areas as chronic diseases; autoimmune diseases; infectious diseases; genetic diseases; toxicology; reproductive health; and other areas where questions relating to human health are ripe for exploration at both the population and molecular scales. Likewise, institutional strengths in applied mathematics and modeling, statistics, genomics, bioinformatics and other informatics and data-driven sciences including geography and demographics, and phenomic approaches could provide excellent foundations for programs that encourage such work.

Letters of Intent are due to Fund on by March 3, 2008.  For full LOI submission details, visit http://www.bwfund.org/programs/population_lab_sciences/pub_lab_apply.html Full applications by invitation only are due May 15, 2008.  LOIs and full applications must be submitted through the Sponsored Program Administration office.