The principal mission of the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) Women's Reproductive Health Research (WRHR) Career Development Center is to promote health and prevent disease in women by expanding the pool of well-trained, imaginative, productive investigators in the field of women's reproductive health. It is our purpose to recruit and prepare outstanding candidates to acquire the new skills needed to reach this goal. In recent years, board-certified obstetrician-gynecologists from even the most renowned institutions have difficulty obtaining faculty positions following traditional three year postdoctoral fellowships with adequate protected time to establish independent research programs. This challenge to a once successful approach can be traced to four major causes: 1) decreasing reimbursement for clinical services, 2) fundamental changes in undergraduate and graduate medical curricula, 3) increased competition for federal research dollars, and 4) the ever increasing complexity of contemporary research methodologies. As one of the original institutions awarded a WRHR Center, we have established an infrastructure, curriculum and Scholar mentoring system to meet the challenge of training the next generation of academic Obstetrician-Gynecologists. Based on the successes of our first cohort of Scholars, we propose a structured Scholarship program of sufficient duration, relevant didactic education, and immersion into a vibrant, intellectually challenging, research community leading to academic independence. We have learned that appropriate scientific mentoring is mandatory during the initial years of a junior faculty appointment, helping the individual to overcome hurdles that impede a rewarding, successful and productive academic career. Scholars will be recruited to pursue two general arenas, biomedical research and clinical research, in reproductive science. In addition, two general pathways (I and II) have been established to guide relatively inexperienced and more senior Scholars, respectively. Translational research, a burgeoning focus within our department that has benefited from long-standing multidisciplinary partnerships, will be gained through participation in studies bridging the biomedically and clinically oriented projects. We are committed to nurture a cadre of UCSF WRHR Scholars that will improve the health status of women by conducting important discovery, expanding knowledge, and testing innovations for the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of reproductive disorders.
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