? PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT CORE The RI-CCTS Professional Development Key Component builds on the state's multiple strengths in education, training, and faculty development. Institutions that are important to this Key Component include Brown's Alpert School of Medicine and its seven affiliated teaching hospitals, Brown's School of Public Health and School of Engineering, and URI's College of Pharmacy and College of Nursing. Faculty at these institutions direct many NIH-funded training and career development programs (e.g., T32s, K12s, R25s), and have extensive mentoring experience. However, significant training and mentoring gaps remain related to Clinical and Translational Research (CTR). With the resources of an IDeA-CTR we will be able to develop a series of critical elements of Professional Development infrastructure that we believe will rapidly transform the RI CTR community. Importantly, our efforts will be focused on the health problems that have been prioritized by the RI Department of Health, including sudden cardiac death, smoking and smoking cessation, obesity, substance abuse and addiction, the elimination new HIV infections, reproductive health, prisoner health, and neuroscience related to mental disorders. We propose the following Specific Aims: 1. Develop new training opportunities that leverage existing institutional resources. Examples of new opportunities are a Mentored Research Award program that will fund three scholars a year, a monthly trans-institutional grant development seminar for all clinical and translational research-oriented career development awardees (e.g., T32s, K12s, R25s) campus-wide, web-based training in interdisciplinary clinical and translational research-oriented topics (e.g., how basic scientists can effectively collaborate with clinicians, and vice versa), and web-based training in how to commercialize research findings. 2. Develop a state-wide mentoring network for clinical and translational research. In addition to developing a comprehensive web-based database of experienced and interested mentors from the Biological Sciences, Public Health, Engineering, Social Sciences, Medicine, Pharmacy, and Nursing, we will develop and implement web-based training for both mentors and mentees in how to optimize the impact of the mentor-mentee relationship. We will give special attention to the mentoring needs of under- represented minorities and women. We believe that the impact of this proposed Professional Development Key Component will be profound because our proposed plan 1) explicitly builds on existing COBRE and INBRE investments, 2) leverages existing institutional resources, and complements these assets with focused new programs and investments, 3) creates infrastructure that links multiple RI institutions in new ways, 4) creates synergies with existing NIH and NSF funded programs, particularly training programs, 5) prioritizes the health needs of the state.
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