The Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh -Cardiology, Hematology and Pulmonology Summer Research Internship Program (CHP2-SRIP)

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The Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh-Cardiology, Hematology and Pulmonology Summer Research Internship Program (CHP2-SRIP) will be the premiere undergraduate research experience in the study of pediatric heart, lung and blood/vasculature. COVID-19 has disproportionately affected Blacks, Latinx, and Native Americans, further exposing longstanding health disparities in the U.S. Indeed, under-represented minority (URM) children are heavily affected with heart, lung, and blood/vascular disorders. For example, Puerto Ricans and African Americans have the highest burden of asthma of all ethnic groups in the U.S., where sickle cell disease mostly affects African American children. Although URM physicians and scientists are more likely to care for or conduct research in URMs, the proportion of URM students in the biomedical sciences is very low. Thus, there is a large unmet need to train the diverse biomedical researchers to develop new and effective treatments and cures for heart, lung and blood diseases, particularly those affecting URMs. UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh (CHP) is well positioned to mentor, train, and motivate undergraduate URM students to become MD and/or PhD scientists focused on research in cardiac, hematological and pulmonary disorders. In addition, there is large unmet need to train the next generation of diverse heart, lung and blood/vascular-based researchers to develop new and effective treatments and cures for the myriad of diseases. This program will allow students to perform research for a 10-week period over the summer as part of the CHP2-SRIP. The pool of URM undergraduates will come from a wide range of Universities around the country and US districts. This program will be administered by the Department of Pediatrics and include faculty from the Pediatric cardiology, pulmonology and hematology/oncology Divisions, Developmental Biology Department, Department of Pathology, Critical Care Department and the School of Public Health. Members of the training faculty will provide a weekly one-hour didactic session on a NHLBI topic followed by a 30-minute discussion on a pertinent paper and a discussion about career options as a heart, lung or blood/vascular researcher. Furthermore, we will provide research training under the mentorship of world-class NHLBI researchers. A multimedia platform has been developed specifically for this program and will act as an interface for past, current and future students. CHP2-SRIP students will be matched with one of the training faculty to pursue a research project. Given the breadth of the training faculty research interests, students will have the opportunity to work on a laboratory-based project or a patient oriented research project. At the end of the 10 weeks, the students will present their work as an oral presentation. Upon completion of this summer program the students will have had exposure to a wide array of NHLBI-based research topics, to nationally respected clinician-scientists and PhD scientists. Given that decisions about a specialty in medicine and/or research focus often happen in early stages of training, the intent of this program is to increase the number of trainees that will eventually become clinician-scientists or PhD scientists in these fields.