Miami Clinical and Translational Science Institute

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Funded as a CTSA in 2012, the Miami Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI) serves as Miami’s academic Hub for interdisciplinary clinical and translational (C/T) research, innovation, and training. Our mission is to accelerate scientific discoveries into interventions that improve health, with a focus on minority populations. The cornerstone of our successful strategy is the sustained support of dynamic partnerships in culturalizing health science—adapting our research to be culturally congruent with diverse stake-holder communities with whom we partner in C/T research, research training, and, importantly, research translation. In a region that is over 88% racial/ethnic minorities, we have modified research techniques to better suit the culture, language, literacy, and norms of groups with whom we work and have fundamentally changed research tools and methods to more precisely capture cultural complexity that greatly affects all aspects of C/T research. We have invested heavily in new research facilities and IT/informatics, including a clinical data warehouse and our Center for Computational Science – one of the largest centralized academic cyber infrastructures in the United States. To develop our workforce, we completely revamped our Clinical Research Professional framework and initiated extensive mentorship programs for all research stakeholders, including Community Health Workers. To lend community voice to research and expand our Hub beyond our traditional walls, our CTSI helped create the OneFlorida Clinical Research Consortium with a data trust and statewide network of urban and rural health care providers and nearly 11M diverse patients across Florida. And as an innovator in the CTSA Network, we participated in shared leadership of consortium-wide activities including the Enhancing Clinical Research Professionals’ Training & Qualifications Supplement Award, and as a pilot site for the i-Corps™ at NCATS program. Well-positioned for CTSA 2.0, our Overall Specific Aims are to: (1) Provide education, training, career development, and mentoring to enhance research excellence in our C/T research workforce; (2) Advance C/T research through partnerships and innovative methods of engaging diverse stakeholders; (3) Integrate disciplines and translational phases to accelerate discovery that benefits the health of diverse populations and individuals across the lifespan; (4) Ensure research processes expedite the conduct of research and add to our understanding of the principles of advancing translational science; (5) Manage a dynamic program of informatics and computational functionality, training, consultation, and development for researchers to effectively use technology to advance their research.