This program is for students:

  • Who want to pursue a PhD in neuroscience
  • Who have completed an undergraduate degree and are seeking additional research training before applying to graduate school
  • Who have been hired as a research intern or research assistant in a neuroscience lab at the University of Iowa

Benefits of the program:

  • Introduction to research
  • Near-peer mentorship from Neuroscience PhD students
  • Workshops covering important professional skills
  • Support in preparing graduate school applications and interviews
  • Community of postbaccalaureate research peers
 

Mission

The mission of the iDREAM+ program is to enhance the training and preparation for graduate school of post-baccalaureate trainees in neuroscience. We aim to foster a sense of belonging for post-baccalaureate research interns in INI labs within the neuroscience community both at Iowa and beyond. We will help scholars, working within their individual labs, develop skill sets and find resources to help them be competitive for and successful in top-tier PhD programs of their choice. 

 

History of post-baccalaureate research at Iowa 

In 2012, UI launched an independent post-baccalaureate research internship to provide a “missing link” in the continuum of campus programs. Termed the “research internship program” it enables recent college graduates to work for one year in laboratories as a means to gain a better understanding of the career path on which they wished to embark and strengthen their research skills. Each year 22-24 positions are approved for the entire campus. This program has positive outcomes in terms of the percentage of students who matriculated into health profession or graduate school.  

In 2023 the University of Iowa was awarded a four-year NIH R25 grant to create the Iowa: Discovering Research Experiences and Mentorship (iDREAM) program. iDREAM offered two years of research training for four students per year. It  filled a unique niche at Iowa by providing guided high-quality research experiences in the context of didactics and community building experiences aimed at making scholars competitive for rigorous graduate programs in neuroscience. 

iDREAM+ is the next iteration of neuroscience postbaccalaureate training at the University of Iowa, supported by institutional funding and philanthropic donations.

Strength of the Neuroscience Program at Iowa and Parent T32

 The T32-supported (JSPTPN) Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Neuroscience has been in existence since 1984 and has a history of strong leadership, including Dan Tranel, its leader from 2000-2026. With 52 preceptors, the graduate program benefits from a wealth of institutional resources, including state-of-the-art biomedical science facilities, a nationally prominent University Hospital, and leading programs in key affiliated departments, especially Biology, Neurology, Neurosurgery, Psychiatry, and Psychological & Brain Sciences. A close connection with the MD/PhD training program (MSTP) enhances the quality of our Program, as a regular stream of highly qualified students matriculate from the MSTP (1-3 per year). Over a recent 20-year epoch, the program has graduated 98 students with a PhD, with a mean time-to degree (TTD) of 5.2 years. An impressive number of our graduates (51% since 1998) are in tenure-track academic positions, many at academic medical and/or research-intensive institutions and many at teaching focused universities and colleges. The Program has long emphasized a balance between breadth and depth of training; students must be conversant across all major facets of neuroscience in order to succeed. Neuroscience students have access to an outstanding faculty, drawn extensively from both basic science and clinical departments across the campus. The graduate program is highly cohesive, and unlike many interdisciplinary programs that suffer from institutional and geographic dispersion, our program is tightly coalesced and interconnected. The students are direct beneficiaries of this cohesion: they have regular direct access to expertise, perspectives, and approaches that cut across all different levels of the field, and students graduate from our program with the ability to think critically about everything from molecules to consciousness.