Graduate Program Curriculum

Students admitted in odd years:

Students admitted in even years:

A qualifying exam is required for PhD candidacy. In the fall semester of the first year, students must decide on the members on their thesis committee and coordinate with medicinal chemistry program members to arrange for the qualifying exam. The deadline for the qualifying exam is August of the second year, however PharmD/PhD students are encouraged to qualify by the end of their first year. For a qualifying exam, students will give a presentation on their thesis project, which should include background, goals, and any preliminary results if available. Preliminary results are useful, however, not required. All didactic course work must be complete in order to pass your qualifying exam (excludes Independent Research Proposal and Seminar in Medicinal Chemistry). Overall, the committee will evaluate five areas:

1. The student’s ability to understand in a broad context their area of research.
2. Their ability to plan and execute rationally designed experiments.
3. Their effort (not results) in the laboratory up until this point.
4. Their proposal for future work on their project.
5. Their performance in coursework.

Students are expected to deliver a one-hour presentation covering the background, experiment design, research output, conclusion, and perspectives. Committee members will raise questions during or after the presentation. Students will receive pass, fail, or conditional pass upon voting from the dissertation committee members. Students who fail the qualifying exam will be advised to graduate with a master’s degree. If you are successful with the qualifying exam, your committee members will then sign paperwork which you will need to submit to the School of Graduate Studies, and you will be formally admitted into candidacy for a Ph.D. degree. In the event of a conditional pass your committee will provide you with a set of requirements that you must meet to pass your qualifying exam. You will then have four to six months to reattempt your qualifying exam in which the only outcomes are pass or fail. Students who fail in the second attempt will be dismissed from the graduate program and be advised to graduate with a MSc degree should he/she meets the requirements of MSc degree.

The Independent Research Proposal is a course taken in the fourth year of candidacy.  Students write a R21 style proposal proposing a project that is distinct from their dissertation work.  The proposal should consist of a single page specific aims page and a six-page research proposal. When complete (your advisor cannot edit it for you), schedule a meeting of the dissertation committee and submit copies of the written document to each member (allow at least two weeks for them to read the proposal). At the scheduled meeting, you will present your proposal to the committee (PowerPoint). Members of the committee may ask questions about anything in the proposal.

A qualifying exam is required for PhD candidacy. In the fall semester of the first year, students must decide on the members on their thesis committee and coordinate with medicinal chemistry program members to arrange for the qualifying exam. The deadline for the qualifying exam is August of the second year, however PharmD/PhD students are encouraged to qualify by the end of their first year. For a qualifying exam, students will give a presentation on their thesis project, which should include background, goals, and any preliminary results if available. Preliminary results are useful, however, not required. All didactic course work must be complete in order to pass your qualifying exam (excludes Independent Research Proposal and Seminar in Medicinal Chemistry). Overall, the committee will evaluate five areas:

1. The student’s ability to understand in a broad context their area of research.
2. Their ability to plan and execute rationally designed experiments.
3. Their effort (not results) in the laboratory up until this point.
4. Their proposal for future work on their project.
5. Their performance in coursework.

Students are expected to deliver a one-hour presentation covering the background, experiment design, research output, conclusion, and perspectives. Committee members will raise questions during or after the presentation. Students will receive pass, fail, or conditional pass upon voting from the dissertation committee members. Students who fail the qualifying exam will be advised to graduate with a master’s degree. If you are successful with the qualifying exam, your committee members will then sign paperwork which you will need to submit to the School of Graduate Studies, and you will be formally admitted into candidacy for a Ph.D. degree. In the event of a conditional pass your committee will provide you with a set of requirements that you must meet to pass your qualifying exam. You will then have four to six months to reattempt your qualifying exam in which the only outcomes are pass or fail. Students who fail in the second attempt will be dismissed from the graduate program and be advised to graduate with a MSc degree should he/she meets the requirements of MSc degree.

The Independent Research Proposal is a course taken in the third or forth year of candidacy.  Students write a R21 style proposal proposing a project that is distinct from their dissertation work.  The proposal should consist of a single page specific aims page and a six-page research proposal. When complete (your advisor cannot edit it for you), schedule a meeting of the dissertation committee and submit copies of the written document to each member (allow at least two weeks for them to read the proposal). At the scheduled meeting, you will present your proposal to the committee (PowerPoint). Members of the committee may ask questions about anything in the proposal.

Students admitted in odd years:

Students admitted in even years:

Students admitted in odd years:

Students admitted in even years:

All non-thesis MS students in the Graduate Program in Medicinal Chemistry are required to take the Non-Thesis Masters Programmatic Study in Medicinal Chemistry (16:663:620) before they can graduate. This is a literature review or a small research project culminating with a final critical essay that a non-thesis student needs to write and present to a master’s committee of three members. Students can perform a variety of projects under the non-thesis option. Examples of a suitable project for the non-thesis programmatic study include:

• Surveying the literature on a new drug target or a class of drugs and writing a critical, focused paper on the topic.
• Performing a small research project that is not as involved as a thesis and writing a project report describing their study and significant results obtained. The research projects can be on a variety of topics such as:
  • Development and application of a new analytical method using LCMS,
  • Identification of new drug metabolites using LCMS and/or NMR,
  • Optimization of a new set of reaction conditions for a chemical
    conversion,
  • A computational docking and virtual screening project

The non-thesis option is for students who are working and cannot commit to the time necessary for a thesis or who don’t wish to perform a large scale project like a thesis. NOTE: ALL students must have a faculty advisor for their project. Students are not assigned to a faculty member; but, instead they must take the initiative to contact a faculty member working in their area of interest. The sooner a student finds an advisor the better!  Students need to develop with their advisor an appropriate topic for the critical essay. A term paper submitted for another course is unacceptable as a critical essay, and the submission of such will be considered as a violation of academic integrity.

The following is a list of electives that have previously been taken by students in the program (as of 2024). Students are encouraged to take electives that align with the graduate project. Advanced Organic Chemistry I is a recommended elective, although it is not required. Electives not listed below must be approved in writing from the PI and Director of Graduate Studies. Please send a copy of the syllabus and a short paragraph as to why the course will be useful for your Ph.D. to the Director of Graduate Studies. Courses offered at Rutgers can be found at: https://classes.rutgers.edu/soc/#home

• Learning Goals and Assessment for M.S. program
• Learning Goals and Assessment for Ph.D. program

Integrity and honesty are the cornerstones of modern science. At all levels, scientists perform experiments and are expected to report their observations in an honest and unbiased manner. At the doctoral level scientists are routinely placed in positions of trust. For example, Ph.D. level scientists are often asked to review manuscripts and grants for scientific accuracy and relevance before they are released to the public. As human beings, scientists are not immune to the many temptations of ethical lapses. Pressure to obtain results that are expected to retain funding on a project, to inflate the yields of reactions, to ignore significant by-products of reactions, not to record reactions that did not work as planned, to cheat on an exam, to plagiarize on a term paper, to “borrow” an idea from a grant proposal you are reviewing, etc are all very real. Yet the cost of these breaches in integrity, if revealed, could be the end of your career. Students are encouraged to consult and read through the Chemical Professional’s Code of Conduct, which can be found at: https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/careers/career-services/ethics/the-chemical-professionals-code-of-conduct.html. This document was approved by the Council Committee on Professional Relations of the American Chemical Society on August 28, 2019 and adopted by the Board of Directors on December 6, 2019.

Rutgers University has a Policy on Academic Integrity for Undergraduate and Graduate Students Rutgers University, New Brunswick Campuses. This can be found online at: http://academicintegrity.rutgers.edu/. Rutgers Graduate School New Brunswick also published a pamphlet on Academic Integrity: Issues for Graduate Students, which can be found at https://studentconduct.rutgers.edu/processes/academic-integrity. This document includes definitions of various violations of academic integrity, including cheating, fabrication, facilitating academic dishonesty, plagiarism, and denying others access to information or material.    A brief description of these terms is given below. For complete descriptions, please refer to the website mentioned above.

Cheating – the use of inappropriate or unacknowledged materials, information, or study aids in an academic exercise.

Fabrication – the falsification or invention of information or data.

Facilitating Academic Dishonesty – Knowingly or negligently allowing your work to be used by others when it is expected that each student is to do his/her own work.

Plagiarism – the representation of the words or ideas of another as one’s own. Failing to properly cite a direct quote or paraphrase of another’s words.

Denying Others Access to Information or Material – making reference works or materials unavailable to others by stealing or defacing books, journals, reserve materials, or altering or deleting computer files belonging to another.

How can you avoid plagiarism when writing an academic or scientific paper? Suppose you use someone else’s words in your paper. In that case, you must enclose those words in quotation marks and then provide a footnote or reference number that refers to a reference citation in which the original words are reported. If a quotation is used from a book or paper that quoted those same words, your citation must be to the original report. If you paraphrase another author, you would properly cite that section as “to paraphrase so and so’s comment…” and then footnote or reference that statement as before. If you copy material directly from a website, you must properly cite that by referencing the exact web address of the page. If you use someone else’s words, whether enclosed in quotes or not, and do not provide a reference or footnote number immediately following those words, you have committed plagiarism. It is also plagiarism if you use words or ideas from someone else and list those sources among your references but fail to link the reference and what it refers to in the text.

What are the penalties for violating academic integrity? Rutgers has categorized the various violations into four levels of severity:

Level One – for minor infractions such as working with another student on a laboratory or homework assignment when such work is prohibited; failure to footnote or properly acknowledge in an extremely limited section of an assignment.

Sanctions may include: an assigned paper or research project on a relevant topic; a make-up assignment at a more difficult level; a grade of zero on the assignment. Records of students convicted of Level One offenses are maintained on file until graduation.

Level Two – dishonesty of a more severe nature or affecting a more significant portion of the coursework. Examples include plagiarism on a more extensive level, using data or materials in a lab experiment without acknowledging the source, e.g. if you use a starting material prepared by someone else but do not acknowledge that fact, receiving assistance from others on an assignment without acknowledging that fact, cheating on a take-home exam.

Sanctions may include receiving a failing grade for the assignment, a failing grade in the course (for cheating on a take-home exam), and disciplinary probation. Records of students convicted of Level Two offenses are maintained on file until graduation.

Level Three – Dishonesty that affects a major or essential portion of work done to meet course requirements. Included here are the following: copying on an hourly or final exam, plagiarism of major portions of a written assignment, facilitating copying during an exam, using prohibited materials during an exam, altering an exam before submitting for regrading, acquiring or distributing an exam from an unauthorized source prior to the exam, presenting someone else’s work as your own, using purchased term papers, denying others access to materials, and fabricating data.

Cases of Level Three and Four dishonesty will be brought before a disciplinary board organized by the Dean of the Graduate School. The minimum sanction will be a one semester suspension from the university. Faculty are ethically bound to report convictions of Level Three and Four offenses on any letters of recommendation they may write for the students.

Level Four – The most serious level of dishonesty. Included here is: any violations of academic dishonesty after returning from a suspension, having someone else take an exam for you, fabrication or falsification of data, plagiarism in a thesis, dissertation, manuscript submitted for publication, or in other work represented as one’s own as a graduate student, sabotaging another students work, willful violation of the ethical code of the profession for which you are preparing (Medicinal Chemistry).

The sanction for Level Four violations is permanent expulsion from the university and a notation of “academic disciplinary separation” permanently attached to your transcript.

As stated in the Rutgers policy: “violations of academic integrity by graduate students will presumably be penalized more severely than violations by first semester first year students.” In other words, graduate students should know better! You are here to learn and become proficient in aspects of medicinal chemistry. This will never happen if you copy work from others.

Your decision to study Medicinal Chemistry at Rutgers was most likely multi-faceted. You may have wanted to attend a school on the East Coast for proximity to family and friends; you may have wanted to attend a large school for the wealth of resources that are present; perhaps you have already decided to do research for a particular professor in our program. No matter your reason for coming here, you desire to study medical chemistry, graduate with either an M.S. or Ph.D., and then find employment in your field. It takes on average, 2-3 years to earn a M.S. and 5-6 years to earn a Ph.D. The faculty members of this program are here to help you achieve your goals in the most rapid manner. There are expectations, however, to obtain a degree.

These expectations include:

• Demonstrate yearly progress towards your degree.
• Demonstrate an understanding of your project.
• Maintain at least a 3.00 GPA with less than two grades of C or C+.
• Complete all course requirements in a timely manner. It is strongly recommended to take 3 courses during your first year.
• Keep a detailed and up to date laboratory notebook.
• Pass qualifying exam by the end of year 2 (PhD)

Rutgers University will not confer graduate degrees (either M.S. or Ph.D.) to students having a grade point average (GPA) < 3.00. Rutgers also limits the number of grades of C or C+ work that a graduate student can use to fulfill degree requirements. It is the policy of the Medicinal Chemistry Graduate Program to limit students to a MAXIMUM of two grades of C or C+. Ph.D. students who exceed two C/C+ grades will not be allowed to continue towards a Ph.D. and will instead be reclassified as terminal M.S. students, where the qualification of M.Sc degree will apply.