New York University (NYU) School of Medicine is a national leader in educating future academic physicians. NYU/Bellevue provides opportunities for translational research: 250,000 ambulatory and 25,000 inpatients/year, access to cohorts of working poor and underserved minorities, and an inquisitive faculty interested in gene-environment interactions. Three interdisciplinary programs intersect in this Environmental Pulmonary Medicine Training Program: the Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine with 60 faculty and 18 fellows, the Nelson Institute/Department of Environmental Medicine with 44 faculty members, and the Sackler Institute of Graduate Biomedical Sciences with 155 faculty in the basic-science departments. The investigators have 30 mentors collaborating on this training grant: 6 pulmonary, 8 environmental medicine and 16 Sackler. All are molecular/computational biologists pursuing genomic/proteomic approaches to evaluating gene-environment queries in human cohorts. They have assembled cohorts with exposures to World Trade Center dust, allergens, asbestos, and tobacco, with environmental pulmonary diseases (asthma, fibrosis, lung cancer, mesothelioma) and intriguing disease-precursor lesions. The investigators are building an Environmental Lung Health Center for translational research with 8 offices and laboratories. They have developed an MS in Translational Research and an MPH in Global Public Health that will add to the didactic components of their environmental medicine training. They have trained 37 postdoctoral fellows, including 8 minorities and 32 in academics. In the past 5 years, the investigators supported 14 trainees (11 in academics, 3 on NIH grants, and one underrepresented minority). They propose a two-year research fellowship for pulmonary fellows to obtain an MS degree and PhD degree to receive didactic instruction in translational research in environmental medicine, emphasizing genomic/proteomic approaches. The principal investigator and co-investigator utilize a Research Training Committee to assist selecting, advising, and monitoring the progress of the trainees. Research fellows develop their own projects and practically all have presented their research at national meetings with publications appearing in peer-reviewed journals. The goal of the program is to train academicians to provide Environmental Pulmonary Medicine leadership into the 21st century. BACKGROUND This renewal application proposed a two year fellowship training program with a shift in direction toward translational research with application of modern molecular approaches including proteomics and genomics. The previous focus was on basic science training in cell and molecular biology, but with the building of an Environmental Lung Health Center for translational research, an MS program in Translational Research and an MPH in Global Public Health the objective has shifted in this direction. Another change is the request now for a total of eight fellows compared to six in the current granting period. There are also a few changes in the participating faculty but the net number remains essentially unchanged at thirty.
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