Making a Digestive Sciences Career Palatable

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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.