Developmental Adaptation

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The current proposal seeks renewal of the Child Health Research Career Development Award in the Department of Pediatrics at Yale Univesity School of Medicine. The goal of the Yale Child Health Research Career Development Program (YCHRCDP) funded by the NICHD award continues to be the advancement of research in child health by preparing physician-scientists for independent research careers in academic and investigative pediatrics. Initially fnded as a P30 award in 1990, over the past 15 years the YCHRCDP has fostered the career development of 38 physician-scientists studying fundamental processes of organ development and childhood disease. Forty percent (40%) of the awardees have been principal investigators on R- or U-level funding from the NIH. Thirty-nine percent (39%) of the awardees have been women, and the rate and timing of independent NIH funding and academic promotion for these female physician-scientists are equivalent to their male counterparts. More than 30 Yale faculty have served as mentors for YCHRCDP awardees, and 70% of our appointees have trained in departments other than pediatrics, including Genetics, Immunobiology; Internal Medicine, Pathology, and Physiology. In keeping with the internal maturation of our program over the past 15 years, our current goal is to expand the impact of the YCHRCDP in five areas: (1) to enlarge the scope of our career development curriculum by incorporating new mmentoring initiatives both within the Department and beyond our walls; (2) to continue to emphasize role models for female physician-scientists (50% of our Internal Advisory Board and 21% of proposed mentors) and to extend this paradigm to minorities (12% of awardees); (3) to expand support for the early years of physician-scientists' careers by integrating financial resources from the Department of Pediatrics, the School of Medicine, and NICHD; (4) to enhance the effectiveness of the YCHRCDP by continuing to strengthen our alliances with research programs of relevance to child health that are sited in other departments; and (5) to forge new linkages with supra-departmental career development programs (Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program and Investigative Medicine Program) at the Yale School of Medicine, thereby enlarging the scope of career development opportunities for our scholars.