Clinical research is evolving rapidly and requires an increasingly sophisticated knowledge base, early acquisition of advanced skills and more collaboration among disciplines. This application seeks to establish a predoctoral clinical research training program at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions (School of Medicine, School of Nursing and Bloomberg School of Public Health) to provide an integrated set of exposures and training opportunities in clinical research for predoctoral trainees during their early professional training and tailored to their degree of interest and commitment. The proposed program builds on a strong foundation of interest and expertise in training in patient-oriented research at Johns Hopkins based in the Welch Center for Prevention, Epidemiology and Clinical Research. The Welch Center was established in 1989 to foster multidisciplinary collaboration between the Schools of Medicine, Public Health and Nursing. Its hallmark has been the conduct of high-impact and high quality multidisciplinary clinical research and training. The Center brings together clinical researchers, epidemiologists, biostatisticians and behavioral scientists with molecular scientists and clinical specialists to address important scientific challenges. The center has catalyzed the creation of research teams (including trainees) with extensive collaboration among scientists across the medical institutions and colleagues across the U.S. This proposal coincides with a sweeping effort to comprehensively reform the Johns Hopkins medical school curriculum that embraces many goals, structural elements and learning methods shared with high quality clinical research training, presenting us with a unique window of opportunity to embed clinical research training meaningfully into our learning environment. We propose to a) enhance the curriculum at Johns Hopkins to provide all predoctoral trainees with core knowledge, attitudes and skills for lifelong interest in participation in clinical research studies, b) provide meaningful short term (summer or elective) clinical research experiences for predoctoral trainees, annually, that will stimulate and maintain their interest in a clinical research career during their medical school training and post-graduate training and c) provide predoctoral trainees with a more intensive learning experience that prepares them to be exemplary clinical researchers (in any discipline, specialty or subspecialty) and teachers of clinical research and d) increase the diversity of trainees and ultimately academic faculty participating in clinical research. We hope to train the next generation of clinical researchers to address complex health problems by starting earlier in the process of career development. In doing so, we hope to optimally prepare young scholars for careers in clinical research and thereby speed the time from biomedical discovery to implementation of therapies to improve health. ? ? ?
