About Dr. Fuhrmann

Cynthia Fuhrmann, PhD, is Associate Professor of the RNA Therapeutics Institute and Biochemistry and Molecular Biotechnology at UMass Chan Medical School (UMass Chan) in Worcester, MA. She has more than 15 years of experience directing programs in professional skills training and career planning for early-career biomedical scientists, including at University of California San Francisco (with a focus on future faculty) and at UMass Chan. As Assistant Dean for Career and Professional Development in the Morningside Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, she founded UMass Chan’s Center for Biomedical Career Development, which serves the campus’s ~600 students and postdocs while acting as a scholarly incubator for educational approaches in PhD career development.  Dr. Fuhrmann's curricular innovations have been funded by the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, and Burroughs Wellcome Fund. Her study on the career interests of biomedical PhD students contributed to the growing national dialogue over the past decade on the training needs of PhD scientists, and has been cited in reports by the NIH, Council of Graduate Schools, Science, Nature Careers, Inside Higher Ed, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. She co-authored myIDP, an interactive career-planning website hosted by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) that is used by more than 200,000 early-career scientists worldwide, and continues scholarship in the use of Individual Development Plans. Dr. Fuhrmann serves on external advisory boards for the Association of American Universities’ PhD Education Initiative, NSF Innovations in Graduate Education Acceleration Hub, and numerous federally-funded training programs, and is active in the Graduate Career Consortium, AAMC GREAT Group, and NIH BEST Consortium. Her engagement with a diverse array of organizations has informed her role leading Professional Development Hub, a national initiative working across stakeholders to advance PhD career development in the sciences. Fuhrmann holds a BS in Chemistry from University of California Davis and a PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from UCSF.

Dr. Fuhrmann works with a core team of dynamic people within the Center for Biomedical Career Development, Morningside Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, Professional Development Hub, and with collaborators on various national projects. More >