Enabling Infectious Disease Research Capacity in the Peruvian Amazon

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7. Project Summary/Abstract Peru is rapidly increasing in stature in public health research, and many successful Peruvian-US research teams have expanded research capacity through training grants based in major universities in Lima. Many of these partnerships have satellite activities to study tropical diseases in Iquitos, the major city in the Peruvian Amazon, but these research and capacity building activities have largely bypassed academic institutions in Iquitos. This D43 training grant is specifically designed to address and correct this disparity, offering a collaborative research training program in partnership with the Universidad Nacional de la Amazonia Peruana (UNAP; National University of the Peruvian Amazon), the largest health education institution in the region. Our goal is to expand the local workforce of highly trained professionals with public health and infectious diseases research skills, which we propose to achieve by forming a collaborative Master’s degree program based at UNAP for six competitively selected health professionals, leading to a Master’s degree in Public Health from UNAP and a Certificate in International Research in Infectious Diseases from the consortium training program. This intensive, mentored training program with both north-south and south-south training components will be led by faculty from four collaborating institutions (UNAP, Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia [the leading biomedical research university in Peru, located in Lima], Tulane, and Johns Hopkins). The program will be fully integrated with the standard Peruvian training program for health professionals, allowing for trainees to complete their academic and field service requirements while benefiting from the intensive training during programed gap periods and during the standard two-year MPH program at UNAP, while adding less than six months to their total training period. The majority of the training will be conducted locally at UNAP through training modules and online components, although three months of the initial training period will be carried out at Johns Hopkins as part of the Summer Institute of Epidemiology and Biostatistics and the Summer Institute of Tropical Medicine and Public Health. We will supplement the two-year MPH program at UNAP with complementary, short-term training modules led by Tulane, Johns Hopkins, and UPCH faculty that will be open to all MPH students in the UNAP program, expanding the impact of the training program to approximately 80 additional trainees. Working closely with UNAP faculty, we will integrate new program content into the existing MPH curriculum, providing sustainable, ongoing benefits for future UNAP MPH classes. MPH trainees will conclude their training by taking a leading role in writing and assembling a CONCYTEC proposal (Consejo Nacional de Ciencia, Tecnología, e Innovación Tecnológica [Nacional Counsel on Science, Technology, and Technological Innovation], the premier scientific funding agency in Peru) under the direction of a mentoring team. One-month short courses during Years 2-5 for training community field workers and laboratory support staff will also be offered, expanding the pool of research program support staff in Iquitos.