Utah Advanced Course on Mentorship and Leadership on Cancer-Related Health Disparities

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ABSTRACT The overarching goal of the Utah Advanced Course on Mentoring, Leadership, and Cancer-related Health Disparities is to provide innovative state-of-the-art, evidence-based career development experiences to current NCI grantees to enhance their skills in leadership, mentoring, and cancer disparities research for successful transition to independent academic careers. Our long-term goal is to enhance the training of a workforce to meet the nations’ biomedical, behavioral, and clinical research needs that will culminate in the reduction of the burden of cancer across various communities in the United States. Our team of investigators and faculty have a track record of providing high impact research education and training to early career investigators at both local and national scales. We bring expertise in mentoring and leadership training, community-engaged scholarship, cancer-related databases including those that are unique to Utah, and networking opportunities available in cancer consortia. Our specific aims are: 1) To work with the Coordinating Center for the recruitment of NCI grantees into the Utah UE5 Program. 2) To enhance the mentoring skills of program participants through interactive evidence-based educational experiences. We will use a combination of in-person and novel educational technologies to provide mentor training in areas such as building effective mentoring teams, becoming effective mentors for peers, providing culturally aware mentoring, and preparing competitive grant applications including a mock study section. 3) To strengthen the leadership capacity of program participants with an interactive and experiential program to improve their leadership skills in order to manage conflicts, improve communication, handle negotiations, and become high performance researchers. 4) To introduce participants to cancer-related databases such as SEER, SEER-Medicare, and “big data” such as the Utah Population Database (UPDB), the All Payer’s Claims Database (APCD) and Cancer Epidemiology Consortia data to investigate cancer-related health disparities. As more states adopt APCDs and linkage across large databases are increasing this training will provide the participants a competitive edge in the development of their research projects and grant proposals. 5) To work with the Coordinating Center for the evaluation of the Utah UE5 Program. Opportunity and Potential Impact: The Utah UE5 Program addresses a critical gap in the cancer academic workforce by equipping junior faculty committed to pursuing independent academic careers with advanced career development experiences. Successful completion of the goals of the Utah UE5 program will lead to the infusion of an additional cadre of 200 well-trained diverse faculty, thus expanding the capacity to reduce the burden of cancer-related health disparities in communities across the United States.