The University of California, Irvine's (UCI) Gynecologic Oncology Fellowship Program is requesting continued support for the Fellowship Training Program, which has been operating for over 30 years, and has been supported for 20 years by this T32 grant. The training grant is administered by UCI's Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology and Division of Gynecology Oncology. The Gynecologic Oncology Fellowship Program is dedicated to training physician scientists in the sub-specialty of Gynecologic Oncology by providing multiple levels of interaction between basic and clinical scientists to facilitate the transfer and exchange of information. The Fellowship Program provides trainees with opportunities for the practical application of skills in the design and testing of scientific hypotheses. Trainees receive two years of laboratory research training in the basic sciences followed by two years of clinical training, with a focus on clinical/translational research. There are twenty faculty mentors, made up of basic scientists and clinical researchers from eleven departments in the School of Biological Sciences and School of Medicine. Faculty Mentors have research concentrations in the following areas: tumor angiogenesis, developmental therapeutics, experimental medicine, oncologic signal transduction pathways, carcinogenesis, psycho-social and neuro-immunologic function, epidemiology and healthcare disparities, survivorship medicine, and in-vivo functional onco-imaging. All of the training faculty have active, peer-reviewed research grants directly relevant to cancer research, or cancer- related. Competition is keen for the one or two available entry-level Fellowship positions annually. Recruitment for the Fellowship Program draws from the 1,200 Obstetrics and Gynecology senior residents nationwide. Over 95% of the graduates from the UC Irvine Gynecologic Oncology Fellowship Program have assumed academic faculty positions (see Table 12B). Training features of the program include didactic coursework in the areas of responsible conduct of research, biostatistics and epidemiology, fundamentals of gynecologic oncology, evidence-based medicine in gynecologic oncology, and cancer-related electives, national scientific meetings, and numerous other multi-disciplinary seminars, lectures and symposia. Support is requested for three Postdoctoral Fellowship positions in each year of the grant. Fellows will be supported by funds from the training grant for the first two years, with supplemental support from the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology. The Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology will fully support fellows in years three and four of their training.
The Fellowship Program will train the physician scientists in the field of Gynecological Oncology for future generations of not only grateful cancer patients but for future medical students and residents interested in both the discovery of cures for different gynecologic cancers and the realization of meaningful quality of life among survivors. Our graduates will continue to be distinguished members of the academic medical field, leading and contributing to new advances in diagnosis and treatment of gynecologic cancer as both translational scientists and academic surgeons.
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