Graduate Faculty and Research Opportunities
Students conducting thesis-based M.S. or Ph.D. research will typically work with one of the following core Molecular & Biomedical Sciences faculty members, whose research is described in detail on our Faculty webpage.
Occasionally, students will perform their research with a professor appointed in a different department on the University of Maine Orono campus. This option may be possible if the thesis project is substantially related to microbiology, biochemistry, and/or molecular biology. Please note: Molecular & Biomedical Sciences teaching assistantships are usually reserved for students conducting their research in one of the laboratories of the core Molecular & Biomedical Sciences faculty. Contact the Graduate Coordinator for more information.
Students admitted to the graduate program may also carry out their research with faculty at the Maine Medical Center Research Institute (MMCRI) in Portland, Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory (MDIBL), or through other existing cooperative institutional arrangements. Several principal investigators at these external institutions have mentored research students in this degree program. For this route, students typically first identify a mentor at the cooperating institution (such as MDIBL), then they apply to the UMaine Molecular & Biomedical Sciences graduate program and indicate within the application that they would like to work with that specific faculty mentor at that cooperating institution. Typically, this situation evolves organically with an applicant currently employed in a research lab or recruited by a faculty member at one of these cooperating institutions—who jointly decides with the faculty research mentor to pursue the degree in that principal investigator’s laboratory. Details of tuition and stipend coverage by the cooperating institution, hours spent on the thesis research, etc are worked out on an individual basis with the principal investigator and institution. This research mentor is identified in advance of the application process to UMaine. Students working at MMCRI, MDIBL, etc for the thesis research cannot obtain teaching or graduate assistantship financial support at UMaine due to the geographic distance between the institutions and Orono. Students interested in this arrangement should submit, as part of the application, a letter of support from the proposed research advisor. Within this letter, the mentor should indicate their willingness to support the applicant as a graduate student, as part of our cooperative program.