KL2 Career Development Program Abstract Our goal is to establish the TRANSFORM KL2 Career Development Program to provide training and mentoring in skills essential to conducting clinical and translational science (CTS) in the era of interdisciplinary team research. The proposed program will enhance the career development, translational capabilities, and collaborative skills of faculty and scientists from diverse disciplines. Recruitment efforts will be targeted at investigators with research or health professional doctorates in medicine, pediatrics, surgery, dentistry, nursing, allied health, pharmacology, health care administration and management, clinical research design, epidemiology, biostatistics, biomedical informatics, economics, quality improvement, modeling systems, bioethics, engineering, and behavioral science. Program graduates will receive excellent career mentoring, and will also gain expertise in advanced CTS methods and experimental approaches that will allow them to compete more effectively for external funding in the biomedical, clinical, behavioral, and social sciences, and ultimately to contribute to an interdisciplinary workforce and enhanced translational ability to prevent and treat diseases. Our goals are to: (i) develop innovative education and career development programs, building on and extending our many successful existing programs, that will enhance the ability of our scholars and trainees to engage in interdisciplinary teamwork, make new discoveries, and translate those discoveries to patient benefit; (ii) demonstrate the effectiveness of those programs through continuous monitoring and assessment for quality improvement, using key metrics to evaluate the impact of our educational programs on research output, career trajectories, and continued engagement in biomedical research; and (iii) disseminate findings on novel educational delivery approaches, new methods for assessing student learning, and best practices in enhancing interdisciplinary team science skills to our partners at Columbia, the members of the CTSA consortium, and educational programs throughout the nation. Given our track record and outstanding applicant pool, we are ready to undertake the proposed aims and we are confident that we can achieve our training goals, which will expedite the development of the next generation of CTS researchers who will not only contribute substantially to clinical and translational research, but will also perform as effective members and leaders of diverse and interdisciplinary scientific teams, with the ability to advance partnerships with industry, patient advocacy groups, our local community in Northern Manhattan and Harlem, and other stakeholder groups. We believe that our program will be successful due to the outstanding CUMC research portfolio, our 10+ years of experience in administering successful training and mentoring programs, our investment in the national efforts towards research competencies and mentor development, and the personnel and electronic infrastructure provided by our CTSA resources. We are poised to contribute substantially to NIH's goal of building a larger, diverse, and well-prepared CTS workforce.
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