Medical Student Alcohol Research Internship

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ABSTRACT In order to effectively address the need for physician scientists who are trained to conduct biomedical research, we propose a short-term research training program for pre-matriculating and matriculated medical students at LSUHSC-New Orleans. This Summer Internship Program (SIP) will support five students to work with researchers within the Department of Ophthalmology and the Lion’s Eye Center and is designed to cultivate their interest in careers focused on eye disease research. We have identified many faculty mentors who are working on both clinical and basic science studies of alcohol abuse. Students will conduct intensive hands-on clinical or basic science research for 10 weeks in the summer, working with ARC faculty. Those students who participate for a second summer (pre-matriculated students) will act as peer mentors to incoming students, thus providing an important mentoring component to the program. The goals of this program include: 1) to provide medical students with research experiences; 2) to provide students with strong career and research mentoring; 3) to increase the participation in research by women and minority students; 4) to provide summer interns with the career skills they will need to succeed in academic medicine. In addition to their research experience, students will receive didactic training on: lab safety, responsible conduct of research, HIPPA, use of animals in research, skill development in writing abstracts and presenting research results (oral and poster presentations). At the end of the summer, students will give a poster presentation at the Medical School Research Day. The Dean’s office will also help support their travel to present their data at national or regional meetings. We will work to recruit 10% underrepresented minority participants, reflecting the demographics of the LSU medical school class. In order to determine the impact the program has on individual participants, summer interns will complete Goals Attainment Scales (GAS) as well as Research Self Efficacy (RSE) surveys. GAS has been shown to be a valuable and flexible technique for the evaluation of summer research training programs. RSE is a major predictor of career choice and performance. We will also conduct formative and summative evaluations concerning the entire program, in order to determine what programmatic changes may be needed and to tailor the program to better meet the needs of the students. Lastly, working with the Office of Student Affairs, we will implement a career tracking system which will measure the long-term impact of their summer experience on career choices and research participation, thus quantifying the long-term impact of this program. This program will not help to create the next generation of alcohol researchers but also will prepare physicians to treat the variety of alcohol-related diseases.