This R-25 application proposes a competitive renewal of a multi-site, interdisciplinary mentoring program in the field of child psychiatric intervention prevention, and services (CHIPS). The CHIPS program targets post-doc trainees and entry-level faculty preparing to write their first NIMH career development or project grant in the area o intervention, prevention or services for child psychiatric disorders. It combines a one-week summer institute with a minimum of one subsequent year of intensive mentoring, additional web-based videos learning on important topics related to these goals, and mentor-guided expansion of the trainee's professional network. The overarching goals of this program are to: (1) recruit and retain promising early career scientists to child and adolescent mental health intervention, prevention, and services research; (2) increase their success rate and decrease the time to successful acquisition of external funding; and (3) prepare researchers who can conduct research that spans the boundaries of intervention, prevention, and services research and that is informed by advances in translational and developmental science. The one-week summer institute strongly emphasizes experiential exercises and mentoring. It is focused on helping trainees acquire the full range of skills needed to prepare their next grant application. The CHIPS faculty have a record of successful mentoring and together span the breadth of intervention, prevention, and services research, and thus can promote the development of a broader training perspective to program participants than any single training site. Over the course of this renewal we will move current and additional didactics to a flexible web-based system to make the content widely and freely available. Because our Institute approach concentrates on mentoring individual trainees by focusing on their next grant application, helping them gain the skills necessary to write a competitive grant, we will experiment with multi-way video conferencing approaches to see if this aspect of our individualized training can be more economically replicated by telecommuting rather than travel.
Improved prevention and treatment of major psychiatric disorders in youth is a national priority. This R25 targets the critical transition of postdoctoral fellows and junior faculty without funding to successfully funded researcher through a one-week Research Institute and subsequent year-long mentoring process. Our career development approach is based on the model of other successful Summer Research Institutes that target researchers studying adults and geriatric populations but modified to give greater time to small-group and one-on-one mentoring with many of the most senior researchers in this field. In addition, we will move as much content as possible to a free and open web site.
