This revised CTSA Institutional Training Core (TL1) has been designed to leverage the strengths of The New Jersey Alliance for Clinical and Translational Science (NJ ACTS), the umbrella organization that will provide an infrastructure to support and enhance clinical and translational research and training in New Jersey. Led by Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences (RBHS) and administered by the Rutgers Institute for Translational Medicine and Science (RITMS), NJ ACTS comprises an Alliance of three universities (Rutgers University, Princeton University, and the New Jersey Institute of Technology) and community-based organizations, hospitals, community health centers, outpatient practices, data centers and two Health Information Exchanges. This unique and dynamic environment will allow us to create a robust and effective platform to train the next generation of translational researchers. Innovative translational research can neither be taught nor accomplished in a silo. We want to encourage our trainees to consider, from the earliest stages of their doctoral experience, the implication and application of their research efforts to the diagnosis, treatment and prevention of disease. To accomplish this, rather than limit our training within a particular department or program, we have gathered an initial cohort of highly productive mentors with proven expertise in basic biomedical and bioengineering research, clinical research, bioinformatics, biostatistics, machine learning, epidemiology, health policy and other key areas that will coalesce to provide mentorship to our trainees. Our cross-disciplinary team has been united as the ?NJ ACTS Academy of Mentors? which will be the educational platform for this TL1 training effort. To enhance the translational nature of this experience, the Academy of Mentors will be shared by both our NJ ACTS Trainees (TL1) and Scholars (KL2). Strategically, we will focus on a trainee pool composed of students who have expressed, by choice of degree(s) and/or graduate program, an interest in translating basic science findings and concepts into disease-relevant applications (MD/PhD. PharmD/PhD, DPT/PhD, Biotechnology, Biomedical Engineering and Psychiatry PhD). With the help of the program leadership and their mentoring team, each trainee will design a curriculum of core and elective courses, workshops, seminars and immersion experiences, to achieve ?precision? training tailored to their needs and research career aspirations. Further, we will systematically assess our programmatic outcomes using valid and reliable metrics within the context of an internal and external evaluation team.
