Mentoring and Research in Patient-Oriented Integrative Medicine

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MENTORING AND RESEARCH IN PATIENT-ORIENTED INTEGRATIVE MEDICINE The renewal Midcareer K24 Award is for Dr. Chenchen Wang to continue her mentoring of the next generation of physician-scientists and to contribute to patient-oriented Integrative Medicine research. Dr. Wang is Professor at Tufts University School of Medicine and Director of the Center for Complementary and Integrative Medicine and holds a strong record of research, publication, and mentoring. Her long-term goal is to advance the science of Integrative Medicine to promote health and healing. Her immediate goals are to obtain protected time to expand and strengthen her innovative, multi-method, and multidisciplinary translational research and mentoring programs for chronic disabling conditions. In the First Four Years of the K24, the PI has completed four major NIH-funded clinical trials studying comparative effectiveness of mind-body interventions for chronic musculoskeletal pain, developing integrative treatment approaches in military and veterans populations, and provided groundbreaking evidence on neurobiological and physiological responses to mind-body interventions. In this period, the PI published 61 articles, 8 as first author and 53 as senior author. The PI and her mentored team also received a new R01-like grant from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs to investigate the efficacy of a mind-body intervention for veterans suffering with Gulf War Illness. During the initial K24 period, she has been primary or co-primary mentor for 23 trainees with doctoral degrees. Her trainees authored 41 first-authored peer-reviewed publications and had 64 co-authorships. Ten of her trainees have their own NIH or other career grants. Dr. Wang’s multidisciplinary mentoring program, as well as her expertise on mind-body interventions, has been fully integrated into the research and teaching infrastructure of the Tufts Clinical and Translational Science Institute. With access to these outstanding resources and a long-recognized diverse training environment, her selected mentees will continue to obtain training in the rigorous scientific methodology, integrity, ethics, and grant applications necessary to stimulate high-quality, translational, patient-oriented research. The goal of this proposed K24 renewal is to build upon previous and current findings of the PI’s NIH-funded studies to: 1) expand and evaluate translational Integrative Medicine research for chronic disabling conditions in order to inform and benefit medical practice; 2) advance fundamental neuroscience and human biology research to understand the mechanisms of mind-body approaches, with the goal to improve chronic pain management; 3) identify critical unmet needs of novel effective therapies for managing symptoms; and 4) further strengthen the comprehensive interdisciplinary mentoring plan and extend opportunities to new scientists to guide future generations of Integrative Medicine researchers. This K24 renewal will therefore promote multidisciplinary patient-oriented research for the next generation of investigators in order to substantially advance the science on complementary and integrative medicine and contribute to the health, healthcare, and well-being for all.