Stephanie Borchardt’s long-term goal is to work for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. Richard Bauer’s next stop is law school, and then he hopes to do patent law for a pharmaceutical company. Shona Dalal sees herself conducting applied research for an international organization.

They are among seven graduate students and two post-docs preparing for a wide range of careers as part of the Interdisciplinary Training Program in Infectious Diseases at the School of Public Health (SPH).

The program blends modeling techniques and theory with practical experience in the laboratory and field. Students work with two mentors, one in the laboratory sciences such as microbiology or molecular biology, and another in either mathematical modeling or epidemiology field methods.

In practical terms, that means getting students involved in projects that help them understand the science, behavior and data that explain how diseases work.

“There’s only so much you can learn from coursework. This is hands on,” Bauer says.

The hands-on learning is valuable, as is the cross of exposing students to mathematical models, lab work, field experiences and a behavioral understanding of disease, says Betsy Foxman, director of the program and professor of epidemiology at SPH.

“It supplies the students with the necessary vocabulary to speak the language of a full range of sciences,” she says.

The program also builds links among faculty members who might not otherwise have collaborated.

For example, Foxman says students and faculty members bandied about suggestions from their particular disciplines—genomics, biology and epidemiology, among others about how to better understand organisms that cause illness when they get into the middle ear. They melded those various approaches into a grant application and won funding for a new way to identify genes that help bacteria cause middle ear infections.

The program is funded in part by a five-year, $616,000 grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases of the National Institutes of Health.

For more about the Interdisciplinary Training Program in Infectious Diseases, visit http://www.sph.umich.edu/macepid/training/.