The principal objective of the Clinical and Translational Education Program (CTEP) is to develop a pipeline of highly trained C/T researchers (Figure 1) to facilitate the transfer of clinical research - from bench to bedside - into clinical practice. As previously discussed at length, WMC and its partner institutions have a substantial pool of academically strong, diverse students who are potential candidates for our proposed clinical and translational science educational program. A broad didactic multi-disciplinary educational experience has been provided with a strong trans-institutional mentoring program to guide and support trainees as they learn the complexities of conducting research in a team environment. Since our CTSC is designed to promote translational research in a team-oriented environment, all team research members will be provided with the opportunity to obtain the necessary training to establish long-term C/T research careers. In sum, an integrated and flexible environment for research education has been created that is broad in scope, providing training careers in multidisciplinary team-based translational science at varying levels. I. BACKGROUND AND OVERVIEW Rigorous training of future investigators in the science and ethics of clinical and translational (C/T) research is essential to address the anticipated shortage of qualified clinical researchers, increase the odds of success and ultimately impact the quality of clinical care. It is well known that major advances will continue to come from scientists who are motivated by the intellectual challenges of disease-oriented research in their search for new biological discoveries. Evidence-based medicine depends on the results and interpretation of clinical investigations. It is imperative, therefore, that clinical and translational researchers are properly trained so that their research does not suffer from erroneous conclusions, wasted resources or flaws in clinical trial design, analysis and interpretation of data. To this end, a well-coordinated and integrated clinical and translational research training endeavor has been developed utilizing 1:he diverse trans-institutional faculty and other resources for teaching and mentoring. The members of the faculty are from Weill Cornell Medical and Graduate Schools, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Hospital for Special Surgery, the Hunter College School of Nursing, the Hunter College Gene Center (Research Center for Minority Institutions) and the extensive community outreach program coordinated through the Cornell University Cooperative Extension-NYC. As described in the various chapters of this grant and summarized in section XVI of this chapter, the trainees have access to many state-of-the-art facilities, an expanded clinical research center (PCIR), technical and support core facilities, and a large and diverse patient population from its partner hospitals, (see section XVI).
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