Making a Digestive Sciences Career Palatable

描述（由申请人提供）： 这项建议的主要目标是吸引医学生，本科生和研究生工程和其他非医学学科的学生进入消化系统疾病的研究生涯。尽管在癌症、炎症性肠道疾病、消化性溃疡病和慢性肝炎等几种消化系统疾病方面取得了令人兴奋的进展，但其中许多疾病仍需要取得重大进展。我们的假设是，一个课程，展示和消化系统疾病带来的兴奋与医学和非医学背景的学生的发展，将鼓励这些学生从事消化系统疾病的研究。建立这样的课程也将对重建我们从事消化系统疾病研究的生物医学科学家的储备产生重要的积极影响，并可能有助于培养研究消化系统疾病的新方法。我们的具体目标是：（i）建立一个刺激的研讨会系列，旨在，但不限于，工程研究生和本科生。这些研讨会将重点放在重要的消化系统疾病，新技术，包括内窥镜和基因组，临床研究设计，移植生物学，以及其他及时的主题，（ii）创造一个环境，促进研讨会课程报名者参与与消化系统疾病研究相关的研究经验。因此，学生参与者将被鼓励积极参与正在进行的研究项目，在我们的胃肠病学和肝病学的部门，并在我们的跨部门消化疾病研究中心。我们预计，在5年的资助期内，我们建议开发的项目将能够自我维持，并将吸引有才华的学生，否则他们可能会选择非消化系统疾病相关或非调查性研究职业。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The major goal of this proposal is to attract medical students, undergraduate and graduate engineering and other students of non-medical disciplines into research careers in digestive disease. Although exciting advances have been accomplished in several digestive diseases, including cancer, inflammatory bowel disease, peptic ulcer disease and chronic hepatitis, significant gains still need to be made for many of these diseases. Our hypothesis is that the development of a curriculum that showcases and brings excitement for digestive diseases to students with medical and non-medical backgrounds, will encourage such students to engage in digestive disease research. Establishment of such a curriculum will also have an important positive impact on the rebuilding of our shrinking reserve of biomedical scientists who are engaged in digestive disease research, and will potentially help foster new approaches to study digestive disease. Our specific aims are to: (i) establish a stimulating seminar series aimed at, but not exclusive to, engineering graduate and undergraduate students. These seminars will focus on important digestive diseases, new technologies including endoscopic and genomic, clinical research design, transplantation biology, among other timely topics, and (ii) create an environment that promotes the participation of the seminar course enrollees in research experiences related to digestive disease research. As such, student participants will be encouraged to actively engage in research projects that are ongoing in our Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology and in our inter-departmental Digestive Disease Research Center. We anticipate that during the 5-year funding period, the program we propose to develop will become self-sustaining, and will attract talented students who may otherwise choose non-digestive disease-related or non-investigative research careers.