The purpose of this Mentored Clinical Scientist Development Program is to support the career development of outstanding physician trainees in an aging-related neuroscience discipline, leading-to-research independence. Training will be conducted as a joint program taking advantage of the diverse and extensive resources of the local neuroscience community, including the University of California-San Diego, Scripps Research Foundation, the Salk Institute, and the Burnham Foundation. Outstanding applicants for the program will be recruited both locally from graduating residents of the clinical neurology program in the Department of Neurosciences at UCSD, and from neurology training programs nationally. 1 slot per year is requested for a 5 year period, totaling 5 training positions. The program will be administered by the Department of Neurosciences, a joint basic science-clinical department. The faculty possesses considerable strength in the genetic, molecular, cellular, systems, behavioral and modeling aspects of nervous system aging research. The faculty are also active in translational research, thereby directly impacting the treatment of human disease. The training program will provide appointees three types of academic experiences to lead to research independence: 1) Basic neuroscience training, accomplished by formal Neuroscience Graduate Program course work and laboratory research rotations, 2) a 3-4 year period of intensive mentored research, and 3) a continuous curriculum of symposia, coursework in aging, and lectures. Trainees who do not have a Ph.D. degree will have the opportunity to enroll in the UCSD Neuroscience Graduate Program and earn a Neuroscience doctoral degree The training program intends to expose the trainees to a breadth of neuroscience topics that are required to approach aging-related questions from a comprehensive and scholarly vantage point, ranging from the study of gene expression to whole systems/behavioral approaches. Individual trainees will then choose a discipline within which to focus and foster a career research topic.
