Undergraduate research experiences are essential to providing important skills and encouragement for students to pursue careers in the health related sciences. These opportunities are often very difficult for undergraduate students to obtain without adequate support from either external or internal funding sources within the University (particularly in the current economic climate), thus limiting not only their exposure bu also their willingness to later pursue a scientific career. There is a need to recruit scientists ito the field of Neurotrauma research as traumatic brain injury (TBI) and spinal cord injury (SCI) are significant causes of permanent paralysis in the United States. The current proposal seeks support for a competitive Neurotrauma-focused summer research program to be hosted by multi-disciplinary laboratories within The Miami Project to Cure Paralysis, a center of excellence for studying and developing therapeutic approaches for repair of central nervous system (CNS) injury caused by neurotrauma. The diverse foci of the research mentors who will participate in this program, from neuroprotection to cell replacement to regeneration to neurorehabilitation, will provide each student with a unique summer project to focus on related to a specific neurotraumatic condition, while advancing the aims of currently-funded parent programs and thus accelerating the pace of scientific advancement. The addition of a structured learning program involving faculty, graduate students, and post-doctoral fellows will serve to teach undergraduate students the processes involved in developing a project and experimentally testing a hypothesis using the standard scientific approach. Students involved in the proposed program will not only be exposed practically and theoretically to scientific research, but will als participate in cutting edge, NIH-funded projects that could have significant impact on the field of Neurotrauma and the US healthcare system. The measure of success of our proposed undergraduate research program will be by the attainment of either graduate or medical school positions by those students who participate in these activities within the listed host laboratories
| Pearse, Damien D; Bastidas, Johana; Izabel, Sarah S et al. (2018) Schwann Cell Transplantation Subdues the Pro-Inflammatory Innate Immune Cell Response after Spinal Cord Injury. Int J Mol Sci 19: |
