Program Information
Program Co-Directors: Doug Soltis and Maurice Swanson
Program Coordinator: Samantha Brooks
The University of Florida Genetics Institute is a multi-college, multi-faceted research center which offers the a degree program leading to the Ph.D. in Genetics and Genomics. Minimum requirements for this degree are available in the Graduate Degrees section of this catalog.
What defines the Genetics & Genomics Graduate Program is the philosophy that good geneticists are integrative geneticists, who incorporate many different subfields of genetics into their work. Accordingly, faculty interests and graduate research opportunities include a wide range of areas: advances in gene therapy, understanding the maintenance of genetic variation, understanding plant immune responses, developing improved algorithms for identifying regulatory motifs in DNA sequences, and the challenges of bioethics to strategies for controlling malaria. Due to the fundamental nature of genetics in the life sciences, our training program is distributed across several colleges at UF, including but not limited to the College of Medicine, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the College of Agricultural and the Life Sciences, and the Florida Museum of Natural History.
Graduate Program Overview
First Year:
Course List | Code | Title | Credits |
| PCB 5065 | Advanced Genetics | 4 |
| GMS 6231 | Genomics and Bioinformatics | 3 |
| GMS 5905 | Special Topics in Biomedical Sciences | 1-4 |
| BCH 6415 | Advanced Molecular and Cell Biology | 3 |
| GMS 6221 | Ethics in Genetics | 1 |
| GMS 6290 | Genetics/Genomics Program Graduate Seminar (begins in the first semester and continues throughout students’ graduate careers) | 1 |
| ANG 7979 | Advanced Research | 1-12 |
The first year core training is the research rotation program, in which students “rotate” through three labs in a minimum of two colleges. Rotations are critical to selecting a graduate advisor: they provide a hands-on opportunity to participate in the research being conducted in a lab, and a mutual opportunity to evaluate fit between advisor and prospective student.
Second Year:
- Individual program of courses and requirements is developed in consultation with major professor and dissertation committee
Admission Standards: Prospective students should have strong backgrounds in biology and other hard sciences. Exceptional students with other backgrounds will also be considered. The research statement required as part of the application has a particularly important part in the admissions decision. Each applicant must describe their research interests, so that Graduate Faculty can evaluate knowledge of the discipline, fit to the program, and ability to articulate and motivate an interesting research problem. The required Letters of Recommendation are also extremely important in helping identify applicants with exceptional aptitude for genetics, and with research experience and promise.
Contact the Genetics and Genomics Graduate Program by email, UFGI-Info@ad.ufl.edu or by phone, 352-273-8100.
For more information, visit our website: http://www.ufgi.ufl.edu.
Degrees Offered with a Major in Genetics and Genomics
- Doctor of Philosophy
- without a concentration
- concentration in Clinical and Translational Science
- concentration in Domestic Animal Genomics
Requirements for these degrees are given in the Graduate Degrees section of this catalog.
