Founded in 1963, the University Eduardo Mondlane (UEM) Faculty of Medicine is Mozambique's oldest and largest medical school, located in the nation's capital, Maputo. UEM has established a vibrant outcomes research partnership with the Vanderbilt Institute for Global Health (VIGH) within the HIV/AIDS work funded through the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). UEM and VIGH propose to train a new generation of Mozambican researchers with a focus on HIV/AIDS implementation science, taking full advantage of the VIGH body of extramurally-funded work in Mozambique. VIGH faculty members have worked intensively with UEM since 2007 to train Mozambican research scientists at both UEM and Vanderbilt University (VU), and to launch high-impact public health interventions linked to the VIGH-led PEPFAR HIV scale-up program in Zamb?zia Province. Aligned with the goals of the FIC Fogarty HIV Research Training Program for Low-and Middle-Income Country (LMIC) Institutions to develop and strengthen the scientific leadership and expertise needed for HIV-related research at eligible LMIC institutions, we have designed a comprehensive training program that is built upon the foundations laid by our UEM-VIGH team to date. We expect to help raise UEM-led implementation science research and research training to a higher plane of productivity and quality. The UEM/VU AITRP (UV-AITRP) is designed to capacitate UEM faculty to become a highly functioning conduit for developing Mozambican research leaders. VIGH will assist UEM to capacitate both current and future faculty to teach and conduct HIV-focused implementation science research.
Our Specific Aims are to 1) Enhance research capacity at the UEM Faculty of Medicine with a focus on HIV/AIDS implementation science research targeting 3 key areas - 1) clinical epidemiology/biostatistics, quality improvement/health services, and biomedical informatics, 2) Strengthen and expand the UEM faculty pool in the HIV/AIDS implementation science research, 3) Nurture innovative research by AITRP trainees/alumni to address HIV care and treatment scale-up via Career Bridging mentored research project opportunities and ongoing career development mentoring. The UV-AITRP will represent the first major investment in UEM graduate medical education and will be complementary to the current Mozambique Medical Education Partnership Initiative (MEPI, with UCSD) that focuses on post-graduate clinical training. The UV-AITRP will rather focus on graduate-level education and faculty development in Community Medicine. We describe our strong partnership with PEPFAR in Mozambique and the links we have with other NIH/FIC training programs. We further highlight our rationale for the training partners, our successes in past training through 19 years of our AITRP program history, and our success in leveraging training funds for securing substantial research resources for our graduates.
The Universidad Eduardo Mondlane (UEM) and the Vanderbilt Institute for Global Health (VIGH) propose to train a new generation of Mozambican researchers with a focus on HIV/AIDS implementation science, taking full advantage of the our extramurally-funded research program in Mozambique. VIGH will assist UEM to capacitate both current and future faculty to teach and conduct HIV-focused implementation science research.
