This is the first submission of this application for competitive renewal of the third cycle of the Adolescent Health Promotion Research Training Program at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. The goal of the program is to provide training in sexual and reproductive health research to post-doctoral Adolescent Medicine physicians. While there have been some major success in utilizing effective interventions to address the high rates of sexual and reproductive health morbidity among adolescents and young adults (AYA), significant age- and racial-ethnic health disparities exist for youth in the United States. This is compounded by workforce shortages of individuals who are trained in Adolescent Health with specialized skills to use scientific evidence to ensure the healthy transition of youth into adulthood. Adolescent Medicine specialists, those who have contact with AYA in clinical settings, must also serve as leaders in the development and implementation of new prevention strategies to effectively prevent STIs, HIV, and unplanned pregnancy. This requires clinicians to critically understand the biopsychosocial development of adolescents and to build upon scientific advancements derived through collaboration with nurses, psychologists, epidemiologists, behavioral, social, and basic scientists, and statisticians. We have created an interactive training environment using an adult learning model that facilitates effective engagement of clinicians and scientists across pertinent fields to foster the development of our trainees. Over the history of the grant, we successfully recruited physician fellows into Adolescent Medicine fellowship and reproductive health research, of whom the majority were women and half were under-represented minorities. All of the fellows who have graduated were recruited into academic positions, key scientific leadership roles in government, and/or have initiated new agencies designed to improve the health of adolescents more broadly. Based on these successes, we now request an additional five years of funding to continue to support three fellows per year, one position for each of the three years of research training. The Adolescent Medicine program at Johns Hopkins University is uniquely qualified to develop and maintain such a program given the on-going research and quality of our faculty, the successful outcomes of our previous trainees, the resources available to foster research development, and the continuous influx of bright dedicated physicians committed to careers in Adolescent Medicine. Our program is also unique because of our emphasis on innovation at the intersection of sexual and reproductive health and the larger social ecology of adolescence to reduce the observed health disparities.
The goal of the Adolescent Health Promotion Research Training Program is to provide training in sexual and reproductive health research to post-doctoral Adolescent Medicine physicians. The physicians who graduate this program will ultimately contribute to the scientific development of innovative and effective prevention strategies for pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections including HIV among youth.
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