Specialist Program in Pathobiology: An undergraduate program in mechanisms of disease
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A specialist undergraduate program was developed in Pathobiology at the University of Toronto in order to teach current concepts in mechanisms of disease to students selected from a large undergraduate life science student population in the Faculty of Arts and Science. The goal of the program was not to train laboratory professionals or to be a pre‐med course. New faculty appointments supported by the university provost, Faculty of Medicine and department were required. The faculty of the Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathobiology was expanded to include a faculty of both basic and clinical scientists who were able to teach a unique curriculum consisting of one full and ten half courses on diverse topics in pathobiology, including cardiovascular pathobiology, neurodegenerative disease, cancer, inflammation, and immunopathology. Following foundation courses in the various life sciences in second year of the Arts and Science curriculum, the Pathobiology courses are introduced in third and fourth year. The courses are small with no more than 30 students in a class which permits more discussion and opportunities for mentoring of students. Students are given didactic lectures and prepare reports and grant applications focused on topics in pathobiology. Reading the current literature on pathogenesis of disease is required. There are hands‐on research opportunities through project course work and twelve‐week summer student placements in graduate faculty research laboratories where students are supervised by faculty, interact with graduate students and carry out a project which they report upon in poster format. Many students utilized these opportunities to select labs for graduate studies. Fourteen classes of Hons. B.Sc. students have graduated from the program. Outcomes were tracked for students graduating between 2007 and 2012 and outcomes for 99 students (70% of available graduates) were determined for the year following graduation. Of these, 52 went to medical school (including three into MD/PhD programs), 31 to graduate life sciences research, 10 to other health care‐related pursuits (e.g., pharmacy, public health), and six to other non‐medical careers. Two former students are currently residents in anatomic pathology. The undergraduate specialist (honours) program in Pathobiology requires a dedicated research faculty who are able to teach at the intersection of basic pathobiology and clinical disease and provides students with an excellent background and preparation for careers in basic discovery and clinical biomedical research.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.039 | 0.016 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".