Our Institutional Career Development Core (ICDC) addresses the significant need for developing future clinical and translational investigators, with emphases on team-based research, entrepreneurial skills, community engagement, leadership development, and mentorship training, through support of the KL2 mechanism. In our new CTSA hub, we will build on our hub's successes over the past 10 years, with unique innovative integration of evolving training approaches, including: 1) mentored career development within CTSA-supported translational research teams; 2) an emphasis on individual development plans (IDPs) and pre-established clinical and translational research competencies tailored to the needs of the individual scholar, emphasizing team-based science; 3) development of leadership competencies through participation in a new Leadership Challenge Program; 4) an Academy of Research Mentors (ARM), to foster mentoring and mentor training; 5) a linked institutional Translational Research Scholars Program (TRSP), which provides an expanded peer group and a wider impact across the institution, as a pipeline for prospective KL2 Scholar applicants; 6) development of entrepreneurial skills through our Translational Research and Entrepreneurial eXploration (TREx) Program; 7) development of Community Engagement training through our new Community Engagement Core, 8) a focus on Informatics education and training, and 9) collaboration and dissemination of program experience to other CTSA hubs in the Texas Regional CTSA Consortium, and the greater national CTSA Consortium. An important feature of our KL2 Scholars Program is its linked position within the continuum of career development, from graduate student training in our TL1 Training Core to the production of independently funded clinical and translational faculty members. Our program is enhanced with financial support from our Provost's office for scholar and programmatic research expenses, education administrators, the ARM, and our Office of Faculty Affairs and Professional Development. UTMB also ranks nationally in promoting diversity, which will enhance our recruitment of underrepresented minority scholars by the participation of faculty from our Hispanic Center of Excellence, and our Medical School Enrichment Program. Our KL2 Scholars Program is well-integrated with other institutional education activities, including our Human Pathophysiology and Translational Medicine graduate program, with courses targeted toward scientific writing, biostatistics, and study design. Early-career faculty as TRSP scholars can compete to become CTSA-supported KL2 Scholars, and with acquisition of their first independent (e.g. R01) funding, scholars advance to become independent investigators and members of the ARM. We project continuously supporting 2 KL2 Scholar slots for a period of up to 3 years per slot, over the cycle duration of the project, and we intend to include externships as part of our Proposed Novel Training. Thus, our ICDC integrates novel team-based training, leadership, and mentoring approaches to foster the career development of future leaders in clinical and translational research.
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