Hampton University-UPCI Education/Training Program

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Abstract/Objective of the program: The primary goal of this project is to initiate a new curriculum and to build the scientific skills of HU undergraduate students with a focus on environmental and epidemiologic factors in cancer incidence, progression, prevention and treatment. A novel training curriculum in molecular epidemiology will complement a workshop course and a didactic course. This initiative builds and branches out from an existing HU-UPCI Partnership. The key to the success of previous work conducted through this partnership was innovation in teaching of undergraduate courses by using a cooperative learning approach to learn cancer biology. The proposed HU-UPCI Education Program will develop a course and a workshop, both new multidisciplinary tools directed at students starting at the sophomore level, with the specific aim to teach how to translate basic science results into human studies, and how results from molecular epidemiologic studies can answer public health issues related to health disparities. The focus of the workshop, "Skills for Investigative Science," will be on students' development of scientific language skills, framing of hypotheses, critical reading of peer-reviewed journal articles, and communication skills through the public presentation of scientific information. The course, "Curriculum for Translational Cancer Research," will feature lectures by HU-UPCI collaborating faculty and critical review of cancer literature on environmental epidemiology and gene-environment interaction. These courses will be complementary with the established cancer courses. A summer research internship will be available for students who attended the courses, to test specific hypotheses on existing data bases containing both epidemiological and biological data from human studies. The program will also develop evaluative measures that will compare cancer knowledge and beliefs of students prior to and after taking the series of cancer classes and to compare career attitudes of students participating in the summer research internship. Lastly, to advance the academic agenda of this initiative, results will be published in the educational literature and R25E grants will be planned at the end of the current project to support the implementation of additional educational innovations. Completion of these goals will lead us closer to developing a national model for growing the number of minority cancer researchers, which in turn will greatly contribute to reducing cancer health disparities in minorities in America.