This is a competing application for continued support of an NIAID sponsored multidisciplinary program of """"""""Research Training in Experimental Immunology"""""""" at the University of Michigan School of Medicine, beginning its fifteenth year. Faculty preceptors with interests in basic immunology and in immunological mechanisms of disease have been selected from the Departments of Pathology, Medicine, Microbiology and Immunology, and Surgery. Each of the 25 investigators directs an active, highly regarded laboratory with a record of securing extramural research support. Dr. Steven Kunkel, the Program Director, has directed the Michigan program since 2006 when he took over for Dr. Richard A. Miller, the former Program Director, who directed the program since its inception in 1992. Dr. Kunkel will work closely with the Advisory Committee to resolve issues affecting the Program's progress or direction, including formulating program policy and the Graduate Student Affairs Committee to select and advise trainees and resolve issues concerning the Program's curriculum. The training program will continue to sponsor three major activities: (a) a weekly journal club at which trainees and faculty Preceptors meet for explorations of recent immunology papers;(b) a monthly seminar at which invited guest speakers from other Universities present their research data and spend a day meeting with trainees and faculty members;and (c) a Research Colloquium course, whose topic and instructor varies each semester, that allows predoctoral students (and postdoctoral auditors) to read about, and discuss in depth, a series of important topics in modern cellular and molecular immunology. The program includes training in research responsibility and for recruitment of talented members of under-represented minority groups. Support is requested for six predoctoral and two postdoctoral trainees each year, the same number of positions approved in 2002. Predoctoral trainees will leave the program well prepared for postdoctoral studies in nationally prominent immunology laboratories, and postdocs should emerge as strong candidates for independent faculty positions. Relevance: The research performed by the Immunology Program's students directly addresses problems in both fundamental and clinical sciences that have important implications for a broad array of public health problems, including cancer, chronic (e.g. diabetes, arthritis), infectious (e.g. AIDS, mycobacterial) and neurodegenerative diseases.
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