MENTORED CAREER DEVELOPMENT The future of medical research depends critically on the success of training programs in attracting talented young scientists and providing them the education that will allow them to succeed in a rapidly changing medical research environment, one characterized increasingly by cross disciplinary research carried out by teams of researchers. The future of translational and clinical research will also involve greater use of informatics and an orientation to develop discoveries for commercial application. To be successful in pursuing research careers, scholars need to have translational research skills and traditional competencies like skill in writing papers and grants. For scholars and faculty to succeed in a new more complex and evolving research environment, they need to have familiarity with and/or mastery of a broad set of disciplines and must be avid collaborators and lifelong learners. At the Boston University CTSI, we recognize these needs and have crafted a career development program that addresses them. The proposed mentored career development program at the Boston University CTSI builds upon a successful K30 (called the CREST program) targeted toward postdoctoral scholars and a KL2 program targeted to junior faculty. It will target postdoctoral and junior faculty scholars and include a KL2 program that provides stipends for 3 scholars per year. Features of that program included structured team mentoring, matriculation in one of many degree programs in areas of translational research, and a works in progress seminar program and training in grant writing, writing papers and other necessary skills. Evaluation included assessment for core competencies and overlapping surveys about curriculum, seminars and mentoring. To enhance multidisciplinary education and to broaden our scholars career options, the proposed multifaceted program builds upon this foundation, adding the following: a workshop on training the mentor, a shared regional mentoring program, a new degree and seminar series on drug and device development, new opportunities to participate in team and multidisciplinary science and a mini sabbatical program to encourage scholars to acquire skills or knowledge beyond their own discipline. The evaluation of our education program will incorporate state of the art metrics to assess current performance of the programs, thereby permitting real time modifications and will also measure team science successes. We are ready to pool both data and evaluation instruments with the network of CTSAs to enhance improvements in career development programs.
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