MCNP: PhD Program

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MCNP: PhD Program

The UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy offers graduate programs leading to the Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in Pharmaceutical Sciences with concentrations in four disciplinary areas. This section provides an overview of the concentration in the Division of Medicinal Chemistry and Natural Products (MCNP).

MCNP is engaged in multidisciplinary research at the interface of biology, chemistry, and computer science, and related to the discovery and characterization of pharmaceutically relevant small molecules, natural products, and their biomolecular targets. We are committed to providing an outstanding training environment for graduate students and postdoctoral fellows interested in drug discovery, chemical biology, and natural products chemistry. The concentration in Medicinal Chemistry and Natural Products will equip you with the appropriate experimental and theoretical approaches to use or develop chemical tools for understanding and regulating biomedical processes.

Our educational mission is to develop outstanding independent scientists with the knowledge, experience and confidence to step into positions of leadership in academic, industrial or governmental research. We are training the next generation of scientists to explore new drugs in novel ways. Students leave the program better able to identify important unsolved problems in biology and medicine, with an appreciation of how to choose problems for which chemical approaches will be productive for new discovery, and the skill set to provide novel solutions. MCNP provides a fun and exciting place for pharmaceutical research, and our vision is to lead in the development of therapeutic molecules for basic biomedical discovery and its translation for the cure and prevention of human disease. We hope that you will join us and contribute to our program as a student, as a teacher, and as a scholar.

Our program’s degree recipients are well prepared for scientific careers in academia, industry, government and research institutes. All of our graduates have been successful in finding desirable positions. Historically, the majority of our graduates have taken positions in the pharmaceutical industry. In recent years, as the pharmaceutical industry has changed, our graduates have been in increasing demand in emerging biotech and biopharma companies. In addition, we have more and more graduates considering careers in academia.

For all graduate programs, the past decade has seen a trend of increasing participation in postdoctoral research after the PhD. An important measure of the success of our program is whether students are obtaining their first-choice postdocs. To a large extent, our recent graduates are receiving multiple offers from top labs. Our recent graduates have taken postdocs in prestigious labs at Harvard, Duke, Scripps, and MIT, just to name a few.

 

Graduate Students
Recruitment Weekend

The Office of Research and Graduate Education hosts a recruitment weekend for prospective PhD students early each year. See the video below for a taste of this experience (click here for larger version).