PRIDE Academy: Impact of Ancestry and Gender to omics of lung diseases

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PROJECT ABSTRACT This is a new application for a “PRIDE Academy: Impact of Ancestry and Gender on omics of lung diseases” whose objective is to introduce scholars from under-represented backgrounds to omics of lung diseases with a focus on how datasets should be interpreted and applied when working with under-represented populations. This academy will be housed at the Pulmonary and Biomedical Informatics and Personalized Medicine (BiPM) Divisions at Anschutz Medical Campus in Colorado. The Pulmonary Division has a distinguished historical record of training leaders in pulmonary medicine and the relatively new BiPM Division has been instrumental in elucidating to what extent genetics can explain health disparities in complex diseases, particularly asthma. We propose a PRIDE summer academy that will include didactic and hands-on workshops in genomics and proteomics of lung diseases such as asthma, emphysema, pulmonary fibrosis, and pulmonary hypertension. The PRIDE scholars will be assigned a mentoring team closely aligned with the mentees’ research interests. Here, in addition to the usual didactic and hands-on activities, we propose an additional level of training that uses the concept of academic “coaches”. A coach is not intended to supplant the mentor, but rather complement this relationship, since coaches do not interact with the scholars one-on-one but rather as a group. The coach will guide team members through the process of successfully navigating the academic world using well-tested social science approaches. The overall objectives are to select talented underrepresented junior faculty scholars with a demonstrated interest in pulmonary diseases; introduce the scholars to a toolkit including a mentoring team, instruction on “omics” of cardio-pulmonary diseases and a suite of social science theories for academic persistence; pair coaches with scholars to ensure that all the milestones are achieved; provide scholars with grant-writing workshops and mock study sections that will position them to compete for intramural and extramural grants; implement an evaluation plan that measures the degree to which the program is achieving its objectives. Scholars will travel to Denver for the PRIDE summer academies for 2 consecutive years and to Aspen for a face-to-face mid-year meeting at the Annual Tom Petty Aspen Lung Conference. By using the combination of coaching and social science practices such as cultural capital and communities of practice that allow team members to feel connected with each other, and pairing the scholars with distinguished pulmonary and BiPM faculty mentors, we will ensure their academic persistence and ultimate success.