STAGE will offer admission to successful applicants at the following stages of their education or career:
- University of Toronto full-time, Ph.D. students in the second or subsequent years of their doctoral program, who are enrolled in
- the Department of Statistical Sciences or in Biostatistics or Epidemiology at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health
- relevant biomedical doctoral programs, with a background in human genetics and evidence of training and strength in quantitative skills.
- Postdoctoral fellows from relevant disciplines.
The expectation is that successful candidates will be nationally competitive for external awards.
Candidates must demonstrate exceptional academic performance, and fulfill all requirements checked under their respective levels in the table below.
| Eligibility Requirements | Students 1, 2 | Fellows 3 |
|
|---|---|---|---|
| A. | Identify, approach, and engage a Primary Mentor from the STAGE mentor roster. | ||
| B. | Approach, solicit and receive a nomination from a STAGE Mentor (may be an individual other than the Primary Mentor). | ||
| C. | Be enrolled in the second or subsequent years of their doctoral program in one of three affiliated graduate programs at U of T:
Be an exceptional, full-time Ph.D. student enrolled in a relevant biomedical program at U of T, with a background in human genetics and evidence of training and strength in quantitative skills. | ||
| D. | Have completed at least one full academic year of graduate studies. | ||
| E. | Have thesis or practicum research training in any of the three main disciplines contributing to genetic epidemiology research, i.e., Genetic and Molecular Epidemiology, Statistical Genetics and Genomics, or Bio-medical Genetics. | ||
| F. | Have a background or research interest that falls under any of the following disciplines: Epidemiology, Biostatistics, Statistics, Mathematics, Molecular and Forensic Anthropology, Computer Science, or closely related fields, including quantitatively inclined branches of Life Sciences such as Genetics, Bioinformatics, Computational Biology and Psychology, or any other research area that may be relevant to STAGE (see Examples of Research Themes.) 4 | ||
1 Accepted Ph.D. students must fulfill the academic requirements of their underlying degree program and the academic requirements of STAGE. Trainees must remain full-time students while enrolled in STAGE.
2 Preference will be given to Ph.D. students who are in their second or third year of graduate studies. Ph.D. candidates must obtain a passing grade on their comprehensive examination before being admitted into STAGE.
3 Preference will be given to trainees who have three years or less of postdoctoral experience at the time of applying to the Program.
4 STAGE has a significant focus on quantitative skills, thus applicants from disciplines not listed in the table above, or whose research or scholarship is not directly linked to the Program’s research themes (see Examples of Research Themes), must submit, as part of their application, a compelling description of their capabilities, substantiated by experience, and documented by examples of their work.