Evolution and assessment of a master's-level multidisciplinary regenerative medicine program

Abstract

Over the past five years, we have developed a multidisciplinary Master's degree program in Regenerative Medicine at our university. This program involves faculty and students spanning three academic units at our university - Biomedical Engineering, Biological Sciences, and Animal Science. The goals of our program are to prepare students for careers in regenerative medicine in both academia and industry by providing them with broad technical, critical thinking, and problem solving skills. This paper will discuss the evolution of the program and assessment of the program and our students. The Regenerative Medicine Program is a two-year program that consists of three components - one year of coursework, a nine-month internship, and a three-month Master's project. Coursework includes intensive lab work and focuses on principles of stem cell biology, cell culture, scaffold development, cell sodding, immunofluorescence, animal surgery and experimentation, therapeutic delivery, fluorescence microscopy, and image analysis. After completing all core coursework, students complete an intensive nine-month internship at one of our partner institutions, which include four academic and four industry partners. Once their internship is complete, students return for one last quarter at the university where they work on a research project and transfer knowledge from their internship back to the university. Throughout the program, students are given direct feedback on their performance. They are assessed by the instructor of each core course on areas such as motivation, independence, dependability, attitude, quality of work, etc. Students meet with a faculty mentor at least once a quarter to receive and discuss these assessments. When students leave to go on their 9-month internships, they maintain close contact with their faculty mentors, providing monthly progress reports as well as monthly mentoring sessions via phone. Internship supervisors provide performance evaluations every three months. All of these mentoring and feedback mechanisms increase student success and serve to improve performance. The program has undergone continuous assessment and improvement since the program began in 2009. Faculty and students in the program meet with an advisory board yearly, which is comprised of individuals from each of our partner institutions. The advisory board helps to assess the content of the courses, student preparation for the internship, student performance during the internship, program logistics, future directions of the field of regenerative medicine, and relevance of our coursework and program to ensure we continue to meet the needs of academia and industry. Results of these assessments will be presented in the final paper and demonstrate the success of the program.