? The objective of the Basic Science Training Program in Drug Abuse is the training of predoctoral and postdoctoral fellows in a broad range of biological research methods relevant to drug abuse and addiction. The training program fills an important need by increasing the number of basic science researchers in the field of drug abuse. A major strength of the training program is the multidisciplinary and proven basic research records of its training facility. The basic research is aimed at delineating the neurobiological mechanisms underlying drug addiction, with a purposeful endpoint being the development of new treatments for drug addiction that are designed to alter these neurobiological mechanisms. Our training program benefits greatly from the depth and breadth of the faculty's commitment to drug abuse research. There are active research programs, with strong grant support, at the molecular, biochemical, cellular, neuropharmacological, and behavioral levels in drug abuse with a primary focus on cocaine, and opiates. Other important strengths are the integration of the basic science training program with a well-established clinical program in drug abuse and the unique opportunity for the preclinical investigators to couple their work to direct clinical trials. The existence of a training program in biological psychiatry means that the drug abuse fellows are in a rich basic research environment with fellow trainees in broad areas of neuroscience. This proximity, along with several combined seminar activities, also has the added benefit of exposing a much larger number of trainees overall to drug abuse research. The existence of a clinical training program in drug abuse facilitates one of the central goals of the training program: to offer a unique opportunity for integrating basic research within a clinical context. In this model, the basic research is driven by identified clinical needs, with basic research findings then applied rapidly to ongoing clinical research programs and trials. Finally, drug abuse trainees benefit enormously from the outstanding basic molecular and cell biology training programs at UT Southwestern, which helps build our drug abuse research on the strongest molecular and cellular foundations. ? ? ? ?
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