A. Overview. At Michigan, we enjoy a campus rich in clinical research training programs. We have NCRR K30 and K12 programs under the same leadership. There are two other NIH K12 programs and we are the only institution to house all three RWJ clinical research training programs. Several years ago, the institutionally-funded Center for Advancement of Clinical Research (now MICHR) began to help coordinate some of these programs and also began a series of education programs aimed at both faculty and staff that filled gaps not addressed by these NIH-funded and other training programs. More recently, MICHR also recently worked with Dr. Sewon Kang to successfully compete for a Roadmap T32, aimed at giving medical, dental, nursing, and pharmacy students additional training in clinical research. Last year this new program began a second new Master's in Clinical Research to augment and complement the longstanding and successful On Job, On Campus Master's in Clinical Research Design and Statistical Analysis in the School of Public Health. MICHR leadership has continued to work closely with the leaders of all of the above programs, serving as members on the executive and advisory committees of these units and co-sponsoring a number of education courses and symposia. Despite many successful programs and a high existing degree of integration during our planning for the UM CTSA, we identified many present barriers or unrecognized opportunities that we felt could be addressed by a new MICHR Education Program. To train individuals who will comprise the translational research teams of the future, we feel we must not only build upon these successful programs, but entirely re-engineer the educational paradigms we use to train clinical and translational researchers. We propose an innovative program to overcome the following barriers: ? Although all of these clinical and translational research training programs at UM are successful and fill critical needs, they focus on providing time-intensive training requiring one year or more of dedicated study and are designed primarily for physicians and other healthcare providers. o The research teams of the future will contain many healthcare providers and others who do not desire or need as intensive training; we have few programs at UM aimed at these key research team members, o Similarly, the research teams of the future need intensively trained study coordinators, data managers, etc., who are not currently being trained at UM or most universities, o Other important constituencies in the translational research teams of the future whose needs are not being adequately met with our current programs include basic scientists, patients and community members, undergraduates, and mid-career faculty. ? We have 68 T32 training grants at UM, most of which require some modest element of clinical research . training. Often, in each department or unit, a few fellows or residents at at time get an isolated and often inadequate exposure to clinical and translational research methods and training. Not only is this harmful to the overall training of these individuals but, more importantly, it represents a missed opportunity to excite these trainees about a career in clinical and translational research. There is a need for centralized clinical and translational research education programs to meet this need and to enhance the MICHR mission of creating a community of clinical and translational researchers. ? Even though we have excellent mentorship programs embedded within the K30 and K12 programs, Michigan trainees and junior faculty who are not in these programs often have difficulty identifying and engaging a mentor or mentors. ? Success in recruiting qualified minority postdoctoral trainees is limited due to a small pool of candidates in the biomedical sciences. , ? Our current training programs are primarily 'face-to-face' and do not maximally leverage modern technologies to increase access to trainees and faculty, neither at UM nor at a distance. ? New developments in the training of clinical translational researchers often remain within the institution and do not transcend into the national scene. The Education and Mentoring Program of MICHR (hereafter referred to as the Education Program or EP) will design new educational programs and transform existing programs to meet the diverse needs of the broader clinical and translational research community. By utilizing innovative methods in interdisciplinary education and effective mentoring to facilitate the career development, we propose to establish a coordinated curriculum in translational research. The MICHR EP curriculum will: 1) increase the number of professionals receiving combined training in basic and clinical research through expansion of our current master's degrees, certificates, and courses; 2) create a new PhD program in Clinical and Translational Research; 3) create a novel Postdoctoral Translational Scholars Program; 4) consolidate and integrate teaching strategies now used in separate settings; 5) develop translational research tracks in key areas of biomedical and health research, drawing on UM's areas of strength and spanning the bench-bedside-practice translation loop; 6) enhance access to trained mentors; 7) develop novel alternative learning methodology to increase flexibility and expand the reach of training to a wider segment of the academic, professional, and lay communities; 8) expand the training opportunities to the lay and professional communities in order to facilitate translation from bedside-topractice; 9) expand the pool of under-represented minority scholars by increasing and coordinating recruitment efforts and extending translational research education to undergraduate, predoctoral, and graduate minority students; and 10) continuously evaluate the objectives of translational research training program to determine if objectives are successfully met. This Program will be developed according to MICHR guiding objectives. Because the program is focused on education, the majority of aims align with MICHR Guiding Objective 2 (education and training), but other MICHR guiding objectives are also relevant.
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