About the Graduate School

Organized as a distinct division of the University in 1919, the Graduate School at Emory University awarded its first PhD to a student in chemistry in 1948. In the years since, graduate education at Emory has made tremendous advances. The Graduate School now offers degrees in 41 programs across the humanities, social sciences, and sciences. We offer the PhD as the terminal degree in 33 of these programs, and the masters as the terminal degree in eight.

Progressive Research Environment
Roughly 1,500 students are enrolled in our 41 degree programs, and graduate faculty number more than 650. While our students prosper from a low student-teacher ratio and enjoy the collegiality naturally fostered in such a personal setting, they also benefit from the intellectual stimulation, research opportunities, and exposure to scholarly resources that come from being part of a large research university located in a thriving metropolitan area.

Our proximity to Atlanta allows for collaborative partnerships with many local institutions, including the Carter Center, Yerkes National Primate Research Center, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, CARE, the American Cancer Society, and Georgia Institute of Technology.

Today Emory is rapidly gaining world-wide acclaim for the research being conducted by our faculty and graduate students. Our science and health-related research programs are primed for exponential growth with the sale of royalty rights to the anti-HIV drug, Emtriva, invented by Emory chemistry professor Dennis Liotta and pediatrics professor Raymond Schinazi. The University’s share of the proceeds from this sale will funnel back into research and education, particularly the home departments and schools of Professors Liotta and Schinazi.

While Emory’s science programs are making great strides and receiving national recognition, liberal arts research also prospers at Emory. A renowned acquisition by the Woodruff Library and the award of a $2.5 million NEH challenge grant to the Center for Humanistic Inquiry, one of only 10 awarded to cultural institutes across the nation, have moved Emory to the forefront of humanities research.

The Woodruff Library, already nationally recognized for its collection of Irish poetry, recently came into its own as one of the nation’s leading research centers for poetry with its acquisition of the Raymond Danowski Poetry Collection. Strengthening Emory’s burgeoning reputation as a research center for poetry, the CHI will use its NEH challenge grant to establish a new post-doc fellow in poetics and to develop a series of Great Works Seminars and a Public Programming Fund which will bring innovative humanities research currently underway at Emory to the general public. The post-doc fellow in poetics will work with Emory’s extensive poetry collections, including the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library, the Papers of Seamus Heaney, the papers and Library of Ted Hughes, and the J.M. Edelstein Collection of Modern American Poetry.

With these recent accomplishments and others, Emory is quickly moving into a leading role in research across the humanities, social sciences and sciences.

Innovative Scholarship
The Graduate School has a long tradition of developing unique programs in response to the current issues facing academe and society. As a result of this pioneering approach to scholarship, many of our graduate programs have grown up around a framework of interdisciplinary research. Such programs allow our students to engage in cross-disciplinary exchanges grounded in strong disciplinary training.

The Institute of Liberal Arts, established in 1952, boldly transformed academic research, offering graduate students the opportunity to pursue doctoral work in the study of culture and society across the lines of traditional departments and disciplines. It is one of the oldest such programs in the United States and remains today a pacesetter in interdisciplinary research.

The Graduate Division of Religion, established in 1956 in collaboration with the School of Theology, boasts a truly interdisciplinary faculty made up of scholars from professional schools and the College. In the GDR theologians work with sociologists, ethicists work with lawyers, Islamicists work with Buddhist scholars, and ethnographers work with historians. An innovation in religious studies in 1956 and now, the GDR has become one of the country’s top-rated graduate programs in the study of religion.

The Graduate Division of Biological and Biomedical Sciences (GDBBS), established in 1989, integrates the several biological programs across Emory’s campus and provides our students with interdisciplinary training in the life sciences. Students entering one of several interdisciplinary PhD programs housed within the GDBBS have access to over 260 faculty members and the research resources of Emory College, the Medical School, and several university affiliates, including Yerkes National Primate Research Center, Emory University Hospital and its clinical research facilities, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and various programs within Georgia Institute of Technology and Georgia State University. In addition, the Division participates in a Medical Scientist Training Program, which allows students to obtain both MD and PhD degrees and provides initial training for a career in academic medicine.

The PhD program in Women's Studies, one of the oldest women's studies doctoral programs in the country, promotes comparative perspectives on women's studies through interdisciplinary research grounded in careful training in relevant traditional disciplines and research methods. The program’s faculty has expertise in areas of women's studies connected to literature, cultural studies, history, sociology, anthropology, political science, and philosophy. Associated faculty in other departments and schools include scholars in Comparative Literature, the Institute for Liberal Arts, Film Studies, Anthropology, Art History, the Graduate Division of Religion, Philosophy, Spanish and Portuguese, Psychology, the School of Law, Rollins School of Public Health, and Candler School of Theology.

Other interdisciplinary programs offered through the Graduate School include the program in Comparative Literature and the Division of Educational Studies.

Teaching and Mentoring of the Highest Quality
Emory’s tradition of taking innovative approaches to scholarship extends to teaching as well as research. In 1991, the Graduate School instituted a program designed to systematically address the issue of graduate student teaching for all departments. The first program of its kind among Emory’s peer institutions, the Teaching Assistant Training and Teaching Opportunity program (TATTO) embodies the University’s commitment to excellence in both teaching and research. All doctoral students participate in the TATTO program, which provides our students with a graduated introduction to college-level teaching. Consequently, compared to students graduating from most other universities, Emory graduates have much better training and experience in teaching. They enter the job market with well developed teaching portfolios, and abundant evidence from departments shows that this teaching preparation makes our graduates much more competitive on the academic job market. As a result of this program, graduate students at Emory tend to rate their teacher training and teaching experiences very highly. Additionally, course evaluations completed by undergraduates indicate that graduate student teachers have a positive impact on the undergraduate academic experience.

Further demonstrating Emory’s commitment to excellence in teaching are two unique and relatively new programs: On Recent Discoveries by Emory Researchers (ORDER), and Problems and Research to Integrate Science and Mathematics (PRISM).

In 2002, David Lynn, ASA Griggs Candler Professor of Chemistry and Biology, was selected as one of 20 inaugural Howard Hughes Medical Institute professors to receive $1 million to bring scientific research to the undergraduate classroom. With this grant, Professor Lynn established a series of seminars for undergraduates called Origins of ORDER. The semester-long ORDER courses are co-taught by teams of graduate fellows called teacher-scholars. Each teacher-scholar teaches a course section that focuses on some aspect of his or her graduate research project. They explain the origins of their discoveries and the different elements that build research in their respective disciplines. An important objective of ORDER is to change the way science is taught to undergraduates, moving it away from the traditional lecture-based curriculum to a more research-oriented curriculum that actively involves students in posing questions and seeking solutions.

PRISM is a National Science Foundation-funded program that pairs graduate students in the sciences with middle and high school teachers to develop innovative pre-college science curricula using problem-based and investigative case-based learning pedagogy. Developed in 2002 through the collaborative efforts of Pat Marsteller, Center for Science Education director and senior lecturer in biology, and Preetha Ram, assistant dean of Emory College, PRISM has since grown to include the efforts of Jay Justice, professor of chemistry. The program aims to make science more accessible and meaningful to pre-college students by illustrating the principles of science and math at work in real-life problems. Its primary goal is to infuse pre-college students with the desire to investigate problems on their own and become active participants in the learning process.

TATTO, ORDER and PRISM are shining examples of the way graduate education at Emory stretches beyond its own boundaries and those of the university to benefit undergraduate education and the community outside the University.

Citizen Scholars
In addition to creating a line of unique interdisciplinary programs, Emory’s innovative approach to scholarship coupled with a strong sense of service to the broader community have opened the doors to several collaborative partnerships among programs and schools across campus and with area institutes. Through these partnerships, the Graduate School offers fellowship opportunities which bring together graduate students and faculty from across the humanities, social sciences and sciences to engage in cross-disciplinary training, interdisciplinary research and public scholarship.

The graduate fellowship program offered through the Center for Health, Culture and Society brings graduate students and faculty from the humanities, social sciences, and health sciences together with health care professionals to examine interdisciplinary and comparative approaches to issues of broad public health importance.

The Office of University and Community Partnerships (OUCP) Graduate Fellowship program gives our students the opportunity to apply their skills, knowledge and research to real life issues, and work with local agencies and area organizations in addressing the critical problems and needs our communities face today.

The students in these programs benefit tremendously from an energetic exchange of ideas and research with scholars from Emory and around the world. They witness first hand the problems faced by communities here and abroad, and they learn to translate theory into practice as they bring their research and that of other scholars to bear on the world around them.

Many of our graduate students go on to teach and conduct research at top-ranked universities across the nation; others assume leadership roles in the corporate world or with non-profit organizations in this country and abroad; and still others become government leaders, shaping the global economy and political climate. But the single defining trait that connects our students and alumni to each other, to the Graduate School, and to Emory is their work as citizen scholars, seeking solutions to the problems facing today’s communities and transforming the world for the public good.