The University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health proposes to continue to build the Illinois Public Health Research (IPHR) Fellowship Program to foster health protection research in preparedness and primary prevention across life stages. The program has successfully recruited an initial cohort of 4 pre-doctoral students and 12 post-doctoral fellows, all of whom are committed to developing research careers that will address the needs and challenges of urban, higher-risk populations. The current application would extend funding for two additional years, which would permit ongoing replacement recruiting that would maintain the cohort of 16 trainees at full strength. By continuing the current approach to carry-over funding requests, the proposed competitive renewal would permit the IPHR Fellowship to double the number of scientists trained. Evaluation of the program has resulted in a number of modifications of the training experience, including reconfiguring the trans-disciplinary teams into a learner-driven biweekly experience with continued emphasis on intervention effectiveness, community-based participatory research and translational research, but with more formal discussion of the interaction between qualitative and quantitative research methods in public health. Fellows participated in the Emergency Response Team that helped to meet the public health needs of Katrina evacuees and to evaluate that response. The fellows have published successfully during their first year, are developing solid multidisciplinary mentored research projects that have been directly influenced by advisory partnering public health departments, and most are currently in the process of developing grant applications. Mechanisms have been developed to enhance faculty effectiveness and to provide seed funding to promote multidisciplinary mentored projects to translate basic science research into applied public health practice with a focus on both community-responsive and community-collaborative research. Program leadership includes the public health departments and the Environmental Justice Advisory Board. Fellows help establish the research curricula and engage the student research support corps to obtain preliminary research data and gain team leadership experience. The IPHR Fellowship Program is a cost-effective mechanism for training a large number of public health research scientists capable of conducting the trans-disciplinary research needed to impact the major public health problems facing the U.S. and the world. ? ? ? ?
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