BME PHD STUDENT HANDBOOK

Thesis Proposal

Purpose

The thesis proposal should not be thought of as an examination. It serves two very important functions. First, an accepted proposal guarantees the student that the Committee found the hypotheses to be tested (and the experiments that will be used to test them) acceptable. Second, it provides the student with important feedback on his/her proposed research. Although the dissertation preceptor will certainly provide the student's most valuable advice, the Committee and teaching faculty provide a wide range of experience that has often proved valuable during the proposal process. In many cases, the Committee has acted in the student's interests in asking that a more limited research plan be pursued.

When the thesis proposal should be submitted

The thesis proposal should be presented within one year of taking the GBO or as soon as a line of research has been defined and there is evidence that the experimental protocols can be carried out. On the other hand, presentation should not be delayed until the student feels that the thesis is "in the bag." This practice has, on one or two occasions, caused considerable pain when a student has presented what he/she considered to be an almost complete dissertation as a proposal and has had it rejected!

Form of the thesis proposal

The written proposal should be in the form of an NIH grant request, and it should be cast in the form of hypothesis-testing, not fact gathering. The proposal should include the Specific Aims (1 page), Background and Significance (3 pages), Preliminary Results (8 pages), Methods (9 pages), and Animal Welfare (1 page) sections⁽¹⁾. It need not include the Budget. Guidelines and suggestions for writing NIH applications can be obtained from the program director's office, and these should be consulted before beginning the proposal.

Presentation of the thesis proposal

Students present the thesis proposal orally before their Thesis Committee (see below) and other interested faculty members.  It is the student's responsibility to distribute the proposal to the faculty at least one week before the oral presentation.  This can be done electronically by email or by placing a copy of the proposal on a suitable web page from which it can be downloaded.  It is also the student's responsibility to arrange a place and a time for the presentation at which all members of the thesis committee can attend.

Generally, the student should plan to speak for about 30-40 minutes.  The Committee and other faculty will probably spend another 30 minutes asking questions.  The Committee, in a closed session, will then decide whether to approve the thesis proposal.

Disapproval of the thesis proposal

Most proposals are approved. Occasionally, however, the Committee feels that the line of research proposed is too distant from what it considers Biomedical Engineering or, more often, that the hypotheses to be tested are not stated clearly enough. Under these circumstances, the student will be asked to resubmit the proposal.

Thesis Committee

At the time of the presentation of the thesis proposal, each student should propose to the program director a 3-member thesis committee, one member of which will be a member of the Biomedical Engineering Committee or have a primary faculty appointment in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and one member of which will be the principal thesis advisor. This committee must also include the "inhouse" advisor when the principal thesis advisor has no direct affiliation with either the Biomedical Engineering Committee or Department. There should also be two additional faculty members present at the thesis proposal.  These faculty should not be part of the research team that the student is working with. That is, their perspective of the proposal must be as "independent" observers. At least one of the two must be a member of the BME Committee. We would like, to the greatest extent possible, for proposals to be held in Talbot/Clark 110 at 9:00AM Friday AM so that it can be a regular event preceding Fridays faculty meeting. The BME PhD Program will advertise these proposals as if they were seminars and will provide food and drink. The thesis committee will be provisionally approved by the program director and presented to the Biomedical Engineering Committee for final approval at the time of the thesis proposal.

¹ These are all maximum lengths for single-spaced proposals.