The UTHSCSA Graduate Student
Association (GSA) hosted its first-of-its-kind meeting of graduate student
leaders on March 12 from across the UT-System.

In addition to the Health
Science Center, the meeting featured graduate students from UTHSC-Houston,
UT-Southwestern, UT-Austin, UT-Dallas, UT-Arlington, UTSA, UTMB and
UTHSC-Tyler.

The purpose of the meeting was to increase inter-institutional
cooperation as well as to establish new mechanisms for biomedical sciences
graduate students to collaborate and pursue joint initiatives.

Dr. David Weiss opened the
meeting by speaking about the importance of student-led initiatives in graduate
student development and praised the GSA’s successful organization of Science
Fiesta. UT-System Associate Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs, Dr. Kevin
Lemoine reiterated support for graduate students’ initiatives to enhance
training and career development.

The meeting was led by graduate student, Milos Marinkovic, and featured presentations from Ahsan Choudhury and Travis Block of UTHSCSA and Brant Gracia from UT-Austin.

Dr. Teresa Evans also spoke about multi-intuitional efforts to improve graduate student career development. After lunch, the students discussed challenges and opportunities for student-lead initiatives on their campuses and exchanged ideas on how to best implement collaboration across their institutions.

The students agreed to establish
a “Biomedical Graduate Student Network” as an association of individual
Biomedical GSAs from across Texas and elected UTHSCSA’s Milos Marinkovic to
serve as Chair.

To kick-off their joint efforts, the group intends to draw
graduate students form the entire UT-System to this year’s Mikiten Graduate
Research Symposium at The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio.

This event is open to all biomedical disciplines. To register for the Mikiten Graduate Research Symposium or to submit an abstract, click here.

The “Beyond The Bench” series features articles written by students and postdoctoral fellows at the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences at The University of Texas Health Science Center San Antonio.