Graduates of the Program

Graduate and Professional Schools Attended by 2002-2011 Vagelos Scholars Graduates - Total: 131 in 10 years

Currently on hiatus before graduate school (1):
Class of 2009 (1)

Other graduate school (3):
Penn (Fels), Penn (GSE), Oxford, UK (MS)

Directly to Employment (4):
Abt Associates, MD; Amgen, CA; Deloitte, NY; Triage Consulting Group, CA, returned to graduate school (1)

* Three of the above were also Gates Cambridge Scholars prior to entering their doctoral programs.

** One was a combined MBA student at HBS.

The above parallels our experience with the very successful College Biochemistry Program, which has been offered for over thirty years. Our students complete their education in the very best Ph.D. programs, M.D. programs or combined degree programs.
Roy Vagelos himself earned his B.A. in our department in 1950 after which he had a very successful career in science and business.

Historically, of seven science Nobel Prize laureates who earned degrees at the University of Pennsylvania, five earned degrees from the Chemistry Department. Two received B.A. degrees in Chemistry, followed by M.D.s at Penn: M. S. Brown (B.A., 1962; M.D., 1966) and S. B. Prusiner (B.A., 1964, M.D., 1968). Christian Afinsen earned a master's degree in Chemistry (1939), and two earned Ph.D's in Chemistry, Negishi (1963) and Zewail (1974).

In this context, David Baltimore (Nobel Prize in Medicine,1975; also past President of both the Rockefeller University and the California Institute of Technology), while an undergraduate at Swarthmore College (a highly regarded four-year liberal arts college near Philadelphia), did his honors thesis research in the laboratories of two Penn Chemistry faculty in 1960.

Our vision is that Vagelos Scholars will seek novel research paths. Molecular life sciences are broader than today's views of the biosphere: agriculture, medicine, earth sciences and psychology. Today's examples of molecular life sciences include: use of molecular machines from organisms of volcanic hot springs and oceanic thermal vents to sequence DNA to be assembled by mathematical algorithms -- a short cut to the genome project, merely a large molecular structure determination. Use of functional magnetic resonance imaging to study the relation of language acquisition and anatomic location in the human brain -- a process that uses the physics of the atomic nucleus to monitor changes in chemical environment of molecules in the brain which are localized and mapped by mathematical algorithms. This will become the basis of psychology and linguistics in the future.