TRAINING IN MECHANISMS OF PARASITISM

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Scientific and technical-advances over recent years have served to expand the fields of parasitology, bacterial pathogenesis, and immunology. These disciplines are scientifically complementary in that lessons learned from one are often applicable to the others. However, faculty with expertise in these subjects are rarely united into a single program. The University of Iowa has accumulated cores of faculty with expertise in these three areas, and scientific collaborations between these faculty are already extensive. This training grant application is part of a plan to coordinate these collaborative research efforts into an interdepartmental program entitled "Mechanisms of Parasitism". Participating faculty are drawn from the Departments of Biochemistry, Internal Medicine, Microbiology and Pathology and from Interdisciplinary Ph.D. programs in Genetics, Immunology, and Molecular Biology. Thus the research expertise of the faculty is broad. Each participating faculty member has contributed to sponsoring trainees on projects related to parasitism. In many cases these projects will require collaborative research and coordinated sponsoring by faculty members with different and complementary areas of expertise. Predoctoral and postdoctoral trainees will participate in a training plan including coursework, seminars, journal clubs and a semi-annual Research Day, designed to provide a basic understanding of how parasites and bacteria interact with their natural hosts. The program goals are to coordinate and enhance the scientific interactions between participating faculty and their labs in the Parasitism Group, and to provide trainees with a working knowledge of current concepts and techniques relevant to parasitology, bacterial pathogenesis and immunology. It is our firm belief that coordinated scientific interactions between these three disciplines will best serve to advance our understanding of the mechanisms of parasitism.