JDB1025H Developmental Biology

JDB1025H, a Ph.D.-level graduate course, is an in depth study of the principles of developmental biology. The course strives to uncover common principles that govern the development of different phyla, as well as highlighting the details that make species unique.

Registration Information

Students interested in participating in JDB1025H must register using ROSI. Please contact the Graduate Administrator of your department if you need assistance registering for the course on ROSI. 

Once you have completed registering for the course, please contact Cindy Todoroff to inform her that you have registered for this course.

Instructors

Dr. Brent Derry
Department of Molecular Genetics
PGCRL, Hospital for Sick Children
686 Bay Street
Toronto, Ontario M5G 0A4
email: brent.derry@sickkids.ca

Dr. Carol Schuurmans
Department of Biochemistry
Sunnybrook Research Institute
2075 Bayview Ave
Toronto, Ontario M4N 3M5
email: carol.schuurmans@sunnybrook.ca

Time and Place

The Winter 2023 course will begin in January, 2023 (date, location and time TBA)

Eligible Students

Every PhD student in our Program must take JDB1025H in the 3rd, 4th, or 5th year of your PhD.  

No MSc students or auditors will be permitted, no exceptions.

The class limit is 12-14 students, so register early!

Mark Breakdown

Class Participation - 20%
Discussion Leadership - 40%
Grant Proposal - 40%

Class Participation

We expect students to read assigned literature and participate in the student-lead discussion. After each class, the instructors will evaluate each student's participation level and agree upon a mark accordingly.

After the sixth content lecture, the instructors will review each student's participation and contribution to the course. If students are not participating at the level we expect from graduate students, we will ask the student to withdraw from the course.

Discussion Leadership

Each presenter is expected to:

1. Present an introduction to the central biological problems of the topic of the day.

2. The presenter is highly encouraged to not only use the assigned literature, but to expand their knowledge of the subject matter through additional reading in order to explain the approaches to the problem and the major insights uncovered. The discussion leader is also encouraged to meet with the guest expert to make sure and ensure that they (the student) understands the major issues of the relevant topic. The leader must also address any pioneering techniques that facilitated insight.

3. The discussion leader must engage the rest of the class and draw out interpretations and thoughts from other students.

4. The discussion leader is encouraged to use the black board to illustrate principles, and power point to show figures, but to please minimize text on power point slides.

Grant Proposal

In the final two classes, each student will submit a grant-style proposal, including background, rationale, proposed experiments, and anticipated outcomes based on one of the five topics covered in the course.  

The chosen research topic must not be directly related to the student's thesis project, nor can they propose using the same model system used in their thesis project.   The student must get approval of the topic from the course-instructors.

The proposal must provide the following:

1. Introduction to provide necessary background information.

2. Rationale for the project, providing an over-all goal to the study.

3. Details of the Specific Aims. You must provide enough information to convince the reviewer that you are capable of doing the experiments and that they are well thought out. You must also convince the reveiwer that you anticipate certain results (one way or the other), that you can interpret the results, and that the experiments shed light on the overall goal. This will be the body of the proposal.

4. Potential pitfalls. Include some thoughts as to where you see potential trouble in your proposed experiments, but convince the reviewer that you have thought about it and have plans to navigate around the problems.

5. Brief summary that reminds the reviewer why this work is important.