UNC Clinical Translation Science Award-K12 Scholars Program (KL2)

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UNC-CH has created an environment in which the training and career development of junior investigators is a very high priority. In the last 10 years, support from the NIH (K30, 53 T32s, and 6 K12s) as well as from a variety of other funding sources has allowed us to establish a career development program that has been employed as a template for the creation of similar programs at other institutions. Our commitment to young investigators is evident in the recruitment and retention of stellar junior scientists, many of whom have gone on to secure mentored K awards (25 K01s, 18 K08s, and 23 K23s). In addition, junior faculty members from UNCCH have received 5 of the 100 K99/ROO grants awarded by the NIH during the past year. Much of this success is attributable to the Office of Research and Career Development, an entity established to support the careers of our junior investigators. Indeed, this Office has become a model for many of our peer institutions. Despite the success we have enjoyed to date, it has become quite clear that if we are to fulfill the mission of both the NIH Roadmap and the TraCS Institute (i.e., accelerating the translation of scientific discoveries from the laboratory to the bedside and then on to the community), we must create a hew training model, one that breaks down the existing single-discipline silo structure, diversifies our research teams, and redefines our traditional metrics of success. We must expand the number and diversity of trainees, drawing individuals from a variety of disciplines, academic levels (undergraduates through faculty), types of science (basic, clinical, population-based), roles on the team (leader, co-investigator, project manager), and venues (UNC-CH, other universities in the state, the community, the private sector). Only in an environment where the educational culture is already quite mature could such a radical institutional aim (i.e., creating truly modern hybrid research teams fully committed to translating scientific discovery),be proposed. The CTSA Roadmap, with the goal of moving new discoveries from the laboratory bench to the bedside and ultimately into clinical practice, presents an opportunity to transform our educational model in novel ways. The goal of this Education, Training, and Career Development (ETCD) Core is to reinvigorate and redirect our current transformational wave by establishing within the TraCS Institute a centralized administrative home for the training and career development of clinical and translational researchers. Under the aegis of this interdisciplinary multi-school institute, we are proposing a variety of new strategies that are designed to train research professionals who are fully committed to clinical and translational research and who can bridge the divide between basic and clinical discovery. Our Core will then help to assemble them into the interdisciplinary research teams that will utilize the resources of the TraCS Institute to pursue the hybrid science that is so . critical if we are to make scientific discovery a tangible part of medical care.