International Research Training on TB and Other Pulmonary Complications of HIV

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The proposed training program, which builds on a > 20 year history of collaboration in HIV/AIDS-related research and training, will target junior investigators who are based at MAKCHS, Mulago National Referral Hospital, or affiliated non-governmental organizations and aspire to careers in patient-oriented research. The current proposal seeks to enhance opportunities in translational research, which has been identified by Ugandan and U.S. investigators as a critical under-represented need. By offering customized didactic training and practical research experiences in a multi-disciplinary environment, the program will prepare individuals from diverse professional backgrounds to contribute to translational research teams; this team-building represents an efficient and potentially transformative approach to advancing research in the important, under-studied, and inherently inter-disciplinary content area of pulmonary complications of HIV infection. Trainees will be enrolled either in existing masters degree programs at MAKCHS or, in selected circumstances, in degree-conferring distance-learning programs or individual courses at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine or UCSF. Selected trainees will spend limited blocks of time in the U.S. at one of the participating U.S. institutions, where they will undertake advanced courses and intensive laboratory experiences not available at MAKCHS; receive mentoring to prepare them to compete for independent grant funding; obtain assistance with analysis, interpretation, and preparation of abstracts and manuscripts at the data analysis stage; and benefit from other types of career development and faculty mentoring activities. All trainees will pursue longitudinal in-country research projects alongside their didactic training. These research projects will, whenever possible, take advantage of data and specimens being collected through current collaborative NIH-funded HIV/AIDS-related research projects in Uganda, or build on the existing research infrastructure of these projects. Trainees will be eligible to compete for and receive modest funding for their research projects. Priority will be given to training and research proposals that focus on the acquisition and application of translational research methods and that promise to strengthen multi- disciplinary research teams. The result of the training program will be an increase in the number of MAKCHS faculty conducting high quality, locally relevant research on TB and other pulmonary complications of HIV, which will in turn help improve HIV/AIDS outcomes in Uganda and other high-burden countries.