This revised application requests funds to support two years of training to prepare predoctoral students in psychology for scientific careers in the identification of mechanisms underlying severe mental illness and to use this knowledge to develop and test novel interventions. This training program will equip the fellows to establish research careers that genuinely bridge clinical and neuroscience and that solve fundamental problems relating to the development and testing of novel interventions for severe mental illness, in turn reducing the suffering and disability related to mental illness in society. There will be a maximum for four fellows in the program at any one time (two admitted per year). The two-year-long fellowships will fund predoctoral students in their 4th and 5th years of graduate school. We believe there is considerable benefit to providing the proposed training to the most outstanding students, from a very strong pool, at this stage-late in predoctoral education-when the trajectory and interests are clear but the fellows are still far from fully developed. Fellows will engage in a year-long core training seminar and a bimonthly patient case conference, participate in a treatment development clinic, receive training in neuroscience, conduct a research study involving a tool from neuroscience, and participate in career-focused workshops and an annual workshop where trainees' research findings are presented and discussed. In sum, the proposed training program would establish a unique and much needed predoctoral program that will develop scientists who are devoted to the development and testing of novel interventions for severe mental illness. By infusing every aspect of predoctoral training with the principles of clinical science and neuroscience and with the need to integrate multidisciplinary perspectives, we will shape a generation of researchers in ways that could not be achieved in other stages of training.
To reduce the impairment and disability related to mental illness by providing state-of-the-art training to pre- doctoral clinician-scientists. Fellows will be trained to integrate knowledge of the causes of mental illness so as to derive and test novel, highly effective and efficient prevention and treatment strategies for sufferers of severe mental illness.
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