The overarching goal of our Institutional Career Development Core is to prepare our trainees to be successful translational investigators who improve human health.
Specific aims : 1. To train physician scientists and doctoral level health professional as outstanding translational investigators in a 3 year mentored KL2 Clinical Scholars Master's degree program that includes: a) leadership of a human subjects protocol from conception to conclusion, and b) a didactic curriculum to help the Scholar master the competencies to function as an independent translational investigator, 2. To introduce new educational programs to maximize Scholars' ability to benefit from emerging new technology and resources, including ones focused on providing competencies in: a) Engaging communities to insure that patients' and communities' priorities are in incorporated into all phases of protocol development and research conduct b) Developing ontology-driven human phenotyping, c) Querying Big Data Electronic Health Record warehouses to test hypotheses across the translational spectrum, and d) Rapidly and efficiently moving ?From Discovery to Health-Enhancing Products.? To accomplish these specific aims we developed a 3 year Master's degree KL2 Clinical Scholars Program in which Scholars design, conduct, analyze, and disseminate the results of a human subjects protocol under the guidance of a distinguished senior scientific mentor. This experiential core component is complemented: by a didactic curriculum including tutorials in Clinical and Translational Science, Biostatistics, Bioinformatics, and Epidemiology; a weekly Clinical Research Seminar by outstanding translational investigators; a private weekly meeting with the seminar speaker; team science training; a graduate level scientific course; Humanities and Translational Science special events; and training in the Responsible Conduct of Research. To maintain the optimal size of ~15 trainees we complement the Scholars supported by the KL2 program with Scholars supported by University resources. In the upcoming award period we will build on this program by adding new components to strengthen the ability of the Scholars to: engage communities as full partners throughout the entire protocol cycle, from development to dissemination and implementation; develop phenotyping instruments that are backed by ontologies to enhance genotype-phenotype analyses; query large databases of Electronic Health Records to test scientific hypotheses; and develop their laboratory discoveries into products that improve human health. We will collect detailed metrics on each component of the program to drive improvements and we will track the future progress of the graduates of the program with the on-line Graduate Tracking Survey System we developed, which has been adopted by more than 20 other CTSA hubs.
