Development of Psychopathology, Psychobiology, & Behavior

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Understanding development is critical for understanding psychopathology, particularly for identifying the precursors and early manifestations of illness. This postdoctoral training program, entering its 43rd year, focuses on training scientists in areas related to translational developmental neuroscience. The Developmental Psychobiology Research Group (DPRG) is a multi-specialty, multi-departmental, multi-institutional group of collaborative scientists from throughout the Denver metropolitan region. The DPRG has administered this T32 training program since its inception over 40 years ago and is requesting an additional five years of funding with six trainees per year for its 2-3 year postdoctoral training program. The program recruits physicians (primarily child psychiatrists) who will generally enter the program with five to seven years of postdoctoral experience and individuals with a PhD, who will generally enter the program with zero to four years of postdoctoral training. Mentoring faculty are chosen based on research accomplishment, a history of successful research collaborations, and a history of successful research mentoring. Since the last renewal, we have also added secondary mentors, to expand expertise, involve junior faculty, and provide additional collaborative opportunities. The program includes both core and individualized curricular components. Core curricular components includes an ongoing work-in-progress seminar with both faculty and trainee involvement, a writing group, yearly retreats, career development seminars, and training related to the responsible conduct of research and methods to enhance reproducibility and rigor. The individualized curricular components include both class work and direct project experience, including dissemination, mentored by a mentorship team. Ongoing empirically-based review of the program demonstrates both a high level of success of this program’s graduates as well as the program’s curricular flexibility in responding to the results of those reviews. Evaluation of the program is ongoing. Strengths of the program include the quality of the applicants, a collaborative group of outstanding faculty, interaction of trainees from a variety of disciplines, and a strong evaluation process. The scientists trained by this program become leaders in identifying the child and adolescent precursors to mental illness, and in developing novel strategies for treatment and prevention.