This proposal seeks renewal of UCLA's pre- and post-doctoral Training Program in Neuroendocrinology of Reproduction, now in its 20th year. The Program is broad in the sense that it unites faculty with diverse expertise in a cooperative educational enterprise. It is focused in the sense that all faculty and trainees share in the pursuit of understanding the complex interactions of hormonal and neural systems in the control of reproduction. The training faculty are members of the Laboratory of Neuroendocrinology (LNE), a research unit of the Brain Research Institute. The faculty are twelve tenured or tenure-track faculty members representing eight departments of the UCLA School of Medicine and College of Letters and Science. All faculty are primarily or exclusively involved in research, but two are also physicians and thus bring a clinical perspective to the research of the group. A dominant characteristic of the LNE is active collaboration and interaction among the twelve independent research laboratories, at both the faculty and trainee levels, which considerably enriches the educational milieu for trainees. Trainees have free access to laboratories of all LNE faculty and to other laboratories of a world-class biomedical research center. Pre- doctoral trainees must be admitted to one of four Ph.D. programs (Neuroscience, Physiology, Neurobiology, or Human Genetics). Post-doctoral candidates apply directly to research mentors. The Training Program provides for weekly brown bag seminars, numerous didactic graduate courses and seminars in reproductive neuroendocrinology, the Distintzuished Visiting Scientist Program, and instruction in ethical conduct of science and career skills. Research opportunities available in the twelve laboratories include all levels of analysis (molecular and cellular to systems/behavioral and evolutionary), and involve numerous areas such as sex determination and sexual differentiation, hormonal regulation of neural function, gender differences in disease, cellular and molecular analysis of neural development, neural regulation of gonadal and adrenal function, glial neurobiology, stress, aging, neuroendocrine immunology, growth factors and cytokines, and genetic approaches.
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