The broad goal of our T32 training grant program is to provide in-depth research training to talented individuals who are committed to pursuing basic, translational or clinical research focused on anesthesiology, critical care medicine and the surgical sciences. Our program structure ensures that our trainees learn state-of-the-art research techniques, the fundamentals of posing research questions, and the critical thinking involved with analyzing data and reporting their results. Through hands-on mentored research and formalized didactic training, seminars and conferences, our trainees learn to design and conduct experiments, to formulate and write grants, to perform appropriate statistical analyses, and to understand the regulations and ethical issues that are involved in research. We have designed our program to optimize functional interactions between trainees and the talented basic scientists and clinician scientists that serve as faculty mentors for the T32 program in order to produce high quality translational researchers that are capable of collaborating with clinical and basic science investigators. Faculty are organized into 4 tracks that encompass the broad areas of research focus in the Department of Anesthesia: (1) Critical Care, (2) Genomics, Outcomes Research and Bioinformatics, (3) Neurosciences, Pain and Addiction, and (4) Vascular Biology and Bioengineering. Each track is overseen by an appropriate senior researcher from the Department of Anesthesia, and includes clinician-scientists and full-time scientists that are engaged in cutting edge basic, translational and clinical research. Faculty members come from the Department of Anesthesia as well as from multiple clinical and basic science departments across the UCSF campuses. We focus our recruitment efforts towards outstanding MD and MD/PhD candidates who have completed anesthesiology residencies. However, we will also occasionally consider outstanding physician trainees from other clinical disciplines or exceptional full-time PhD scientists, if their research and career goals directly support the mission of academic anesthesiology. We request 4 slots per year, which is an increase from our current allocation of 3 slots. This will allow us to accommodate the growing research trainee pool derived from our recently implemented Research Scholars Track of the Anesthesia Residency, which is a 4-year program (PGY2-PGY5/CA1-CA4) that includes 2 years of protected research time. We will require at minimum a 2-year commitment to post-doctoral research training for the majority of our T32 trainees, but will encourage some trainees do 3 years of training if an additional year is believed to be appropriate for their individualized research training program. Our T32 program is structured to prepare trainees to become independent investigators performing research on a wide range of topics that are relevant to the field of anesthesiology, and to help lay the groundwork for their development into leaders in academic anesthesiology and research.
As medicine and the science continue to evolve there is an increasing need for teams including physicians and scientists with different expertise to work collaboratively to translate research findings to human benefit. Anesthesiologists care for patients with a wide range of medical disorders in multiple clinical areas, and have the capacity to make important contributions to the understanding and development of therapies for diverse disease processes. This training grant program will provide the next generation of physicians and allied scientists with rigorous training in biomedical research so that they can bring more scientific discoveries to patients, and carefully document the safety, efficacy, and importance of the discoveries.
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