Get to Know the Beckman Center Programs

The Beckman Center hosts a wide variety of seminars and symposia within our own doors, and through our service centers; we also financially support other seminar series throughout the Stanford University School of Medicine. Each seminar series, by bringing together scientists from diverse fields to learn from each other and collaborate, helps further the Beckman Center goal of spurring cutting-edge, campus-wide research projects that span disciplines.

Some of these Beckman-supported series cover broad swathes of science, such as the Cancer and Tumor Biology Seminar Series, which presents a variety of research areas related to human cancers. Other are more focused, like the Frontiers in Integrative Microbial Biology Series and the Regenerative Medicine Seminar Series.

The Beckman Center provides a number of $200,000, two-year Technology Development Seed Grants to multidisciplinary pairs of investigators who propose risky, but potentially high-payoff experiments in technological innovation in the biomedical sciences. The winning projects often emphasize the interface between basic science and clinical medicine, helping to push new biological research findings and technologies to have direct therapeutic and diagnostic applications. In 2021, a total of five teams of investigators won funding through these seed grants.

Each year, through the Beckman Center Medical Scholars Program, we support a handful of medical students who are carrying out biomedical research at Stanford. Since one of our goals at the Beckman Center is to ensure that basic science is translated for clinical use, involving medical students—future clinicians—in the research process early in their careers is critical. Medical students who are selected receive financial stipends and, at the end of their projects, present their results at an annual symposium.

Bringing the most outstanding researchers to the Stanford community helps guarantee that we continue to have fresh ideas, technologies, and approaches for research.

Through our Faculty Recruitment Program, the Beckman Center supports the recruitment of new researchers whose collaborative, interdisciplinary approaches and emphasis on translational research are particularly well suited to the overall mission of the Beckman Center. We provide selected faculty members with financial assistance in setting up their new laboratories at Stanford and getting their research moving. More than 60 faculty members have received this support as part of their recruitment to our community.

To learn more about these and other programs, please visit our Programs page.

For more information (media inquiries only), contact:
Naomi Love
(650) 723-8423
naomi.love@stanford.edu