The purpose of the Pitt/UTMB Summer Program is to engage medical students from diverse backgrounds in personally rewarding experiences in aging research and to promote careers in aging research through close relationships with successful role models and enthusiastic peers. The University of Pittsburgh and UTMB are rich environments for a national training program, with numerous active and well established research programs of interest to NIA ranging from basic to clinical and health services research. While Pitt has successful summer programs in aging research for its own medical students, the proposed program will allow students from other schools to participate. This proposal creates a novel recruitment and support network with two neighboring medical schools (University of West Virginia and University of Cincinnati). The summer program is an 8-12 week intensive experience that includes an individualized research experience under a sponsoring mentor, a structured didactic experience that is directly linked to student research projects, opportunities to interact with potential role models and peers and efforts to build a sense of identity and membership for participants. The Program includes both real-time and follow-up evaluation processes designed to continuously improve the program and to assess its effectiveness in achieving its long term goals. The long term goal of the program is to increase the number of established physician investigators who pursue research in high priority areas related to aging.
