The Coordinating Center for the NCI Awardee Skills Development Consortium (NASDC CC), entitled ?Enhancing Cancer Focused Education for Tomorrow's Workforce ? Coordinating Center? will build the infrastructure necessary for the good conduct and success of the five UE5 institutions. A series of courses offered by these UE5 awardees will help mentor junior faculty awarded new NCI Ks and Rs grants. These UE5s, together with the NCI program and the NASDC CC will form a consortium that will support funded junior faculty in establishing and maintaining successful independent academic cancer research careers, in compliance with the 21st Century Cures Act. The NASDC CC will be overseen by a multi-PI team, Drs. Claire Verschraegen and Rebecca Jackson, who are both senior scientists with years of experience in managing network awards.
Three specific aims will be implemented by the NASDC CC.
The first aim will centralize and support UE5 course administration, including trainee recruitment, engagement, and implementation of courses.
The second aim will create and coordinate network activities of a NASDC Steering Committee (SC) which will run the consortium. The NASDC CC will support the organization of various meetings, courses, and other initiatives approved by the NASDC SC. The NASDC CC will communicate all information within the consortium.
The third aim will create and implement a comprehensive evaluation system to measure the success of the UE5 courses and the NASDC program both short- and long-term. The PIs will hire an Operation Manager to administer four implementation cores of the NASDC CC: 1) The Leadership Core will oversee and administer all NASDC CC activities. 2) The Marketing Core will advertise the NASDC courses and help select the participants through a peer-review mechanism, with a focus on diversity enhancement. We will reach about 1500 junior NCI awardees, also known as the clientele, to help them become the cancer key opinion leaders of tomorrow. 3) The Operation Management Core will support the conduct of the courses, to include venues, travels, contracts, catering, data collection, and general information for participants. 4) The Evaluation and Data Analysis Core will develop assessments for the courses, the participants, and the whole NASDC, by using the Kirkpatrick model and a logic model for program evaluation. The Operation Manager will work with the webmaster to provide a communication platform for all aspects of the consortium, and the data analyst for the REDCap data collection tool (a new Scorecard we will create) to be used for academic research by the members of the consortium. All data will be shared and discussed with the NASDC SC to help mold the future of this new consortium. We will publish the results of the analyses and use this information to refine the consortium infrastructure in future years.
The NCI Awardee Skills Development Consortium (NASDC) will be administered by the NASDC Coordinating Center located at Ohio State University to create and support the infrastructure needed to provide funded junior faculty with resources that will bring them life-long success in academic pursuits. Four cores will be deployed to support recruitments of the junior faculty, offer logistics for the courses, collect and analyze courses, participants, and the overall NASDC program evaluations. The Coordinating Center will staff the Steering Committee and its sub- committees for the good conduct of the consortium and will collect and analyze data to help the future direction of the NASDC.
