Modern research in the biological sciences is increasingly multidisciplinary, focused less on single genes and proteins, and more on the complex interactions of multiple genes, macromolecules, and processes within a living organism. To provide the ideas and tools underlying this trend, biologists are embracing the complex technologies and quantitative methods of the physical sciences. Likewise, biophysicists are engaging in problems at the forefront of biology, directing their methods toward important and complex problems such as understanding genome organization, cell functions, and molecular diseases.

The Program in Cell, Molecular, Developmental Biology, and Biophysics (CMDB) at Johns Hopkins cross-trains doctoral students in all of these areas.

CMDB graduate students participate in a core curriculum including molecular biology, cellular biology, developmental biology, and biophysics. Students continue to broaden their knowledge in these areas throughout their graduate training while they specialize in their own research areas. Through this cross-training, PhDs emerge from the CMDB program prepared to tackle complex problems in 21st-century biosciences.

The CMDB program includes faculty from Johns Hopkins University’s departments of biology, biophysics, and chemistry, as well as from the Carnegie Institution for Science Department of Embryology.