IRACDA at University of Illinois at Chicago

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The University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) is an urban, research intensive university committed to serving and educating students from diverse and underserved backgrounds. UIC is a national leader in providing education to under-represented minorities as demonstrated by its status as a Minority Serving, Hispanic Serving, and Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander-Serving institution. We propose the Chicago ARea Excellence in Education & Research (CAREER) program, designed to provide rigorous and balanced team-based training in both teaching and research to a diverse group of postdoctoral fellows, with the goal of producing scholars who are well-equipped to be leaders in academia at research- and teaching-intensive institutions alike. CAREER is a partnership between UIC and Governors State University (GSU), the only public university in Chicago's south suburban area and a school that boasts not only a diverse student body, but also a highly diverse faculty. With the UIC CAREER program we will 1) recruit and retain a diverse cohort of IRACDA scholars and tailor training for individual career goals/trajectories; 2) structure a research-intensive training experience that supports a successful transition of scholars to faculty positions; and 3) design a collaborative curriculum with GSU to train scholars in the core competencies required for excellence in teaching. By drawing upon strong institutional support from the UI Cancer Center, CCTS, Teaching and Learning Center, and the Office of Diversity, our program fills a natural void. Not only are there no IRACDA programs in Chicago or any other urban Midwestern city, but UIC currently has no training programs that support and prepare postdoctoral fellows to be educators and researchers within our diverse community. The CAREER program will bring together faculty from the UIC Colleges of Pharmacy and Medicine into a collaborative partnership to support the research and career development of fellows, while Governors State University will provide the support for developing teaching skills at an undergraduate institution. The structure of the program will not only train postdoctoral fellows, but also help to solidify a pipeline for GSU students to join graduate or professional programs at UIC. The relationship will also foster collaboration between GSU and UIC faculty to encourage new research programs and to develop a culture of educating a diverse community of scientists. The program will encourage postdoctoral fellows to participate in state-of-the-art research programs in well-funded mentor labs from Pharmacy and Medicine focused on a wide variety of research related to NIGMS goals. Fellows will engage in teaching and career development workshops at both UIC and GSU. They will also develop professionally under the guidance of a mentoring team with continued use of the IDP to ensure adequate progress in obtaining funding, publications, and networking. Scholars will have the opportunity to teach in lab based courses, introductory lecture courses, and introduce new pre-health course content missing from the GSU curriculum. Overall, the proposed CAREER program helps to fulfill the mission of UIC by training educators for diverse populations as researchers, mentors, and teachers.