This is a renewal application for five years of continuing support from an established T32 (AA07453) that was first funded in 1982. This application seeks support for three postdoctoral fellows per year. The Alcohol Research Training Program at the University of Pittsburgh is a small, strong, and consistently productive T32 that has trained 41 postdoctoral fellows, 84% of whom are in academic or research positions. Further, the trainees have exceptional success obtaining research funding compared to the national average. The trainees? scholarly output addresses areas of central importance in alcohol research such as onset of alcohol use among children and ontogeny of risk factors for alcohol disorders, long-term effects of prenatal alcohol exposure, effectiveness of prevention and treatment programs for dually-diagnosed patients, and the relation between alcohol abuse and the natural history of AIDS. In response to current research needs in the field of alcohol research, we have re-titled this T32 to Developmental Alcohol Research Training (DART) to establish a new focus: addressing alcohol use and addiction from a developmental perspective focusing on gestation to young adulthood. This emphasis fits entirely with the NIAAA strategic plan to prioritize research on alcohol use disorders as developmental in nature. The DART Program is unique in the NIAAA training portfolio both in its focus on development and the large number of resources available to trainees. The faculty of the training program are highly experienced and can offer direction and mentorship in areas of high priority to NIAAA such as the developmental stages of alcohol use and abuse, timing and consequences of alcohol use, racial and gender differences, and the effects of health disparities on the development of alcohol use and misuse. The faculty have expertise in developmental, epidemiological, clinical, and neurobiological approaches, and advanced quantitative methods. A significant strength of the Program is access to an unusually large number of NIH-funded research projects that include large, longitudinal cohorts and allow analyses across multiple developmental points. The identification of supporting faculty who are not specifically alcohol researchers, but who have parallel expertise in fields such as emergency medicine, nutrition, pediatrics, and statistics, allows trainees to develop their research using novel combinations of methods and expertise. Training involves active participation on research projects with mentors, supplemented by courses in Addictive Behaviors, Developmental Psychopathology, Epidemiology, and Biostatistics, and by the required Integrated Addictions Research Seminar and the Career and Research Development Seminar. The DART program faculty are committed to training researchers to become independent investigators with the skills and tools for collaborative, multidisciplinary research in developmental studies of alcohol use and abuse in order to accomplish excellence and innovation in developmental alcoholism research.
Excessive alcohol consumption is third among the causes of preventable death in the United States. To reduce this heavy toll on the health of the nation, the next generation of alcohol researchers needs to be trained in the most current and sophisticated scientific methods to understand and to reduce alcohol abuse, dependence, and alcohol- related mortality. This proposal is to train these individuals in an ongoing program that has a history of successfully training researchers in alcohol research.
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