The goal of Academic Nephrology Training Program at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) is to prepare trainees for a successful academic research career through expert and comprehensive mentoring in laboratory or clinical research pertinent to kidney disease. The rationale for the program is the pressing nationwide need for well-trained adult and pediatric nephrology faculty, and for skilled investigators in the pathophysiology and epidemiology of kidney disease, its systemic consequences, and its treatment. The program proposed in this application has the faculty expertise, infrastructure, and research opportunities to provide outstanding training. The major emphasis of this application is the training of MD postdoctoral fellows who plan to pursue careers in academic adult and pediatric nephrology, but will also support the training of some non-clinical postdoctoral fellows for careers in academic nephrology, or in basic science related to nephrology. The twenty-eight training faculty are mostly from Nephrology, but include UCSF faculty from different basic and clinical departments to provide greater scope and depth of training opportunities. The faculty has been selected to accommodate the increasingly complex and technologic nature of basic research training, and to provide mentoring in the rigorous biostatistical analysis, complexities of study design, and ethical considerations required for clinical research. The training program emphasizes thematic and interdisciplinary research pertinent to kidney disease. Areas of investigation include renal epithelial cell biology and transport, kidney development, basic immunology and immunologic renal disease, epidemiology of complications of chronic kidney disease and dialysis, and analysis of novel transplant immunosuppressive regimens. Trainees will have full access to the graduate school basic science and biostatistics and epidemiology curriculum, the Advanced Training in Clinical Research curriculum supported in part by the UCSF K30 with the option of full MPH training. Trainees are required to participate in a weekly formal research conference in which trainees, mentors, and outside speakers present their research, and progress is monitored by Fellowship Research Committees, selected jointly by the trainee and primary mentor. The program actively recruits women and minority applicants, and uses feedback from trainees, mentors, and external reviewers to enhance and improve the training experience.
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