STANDOUT in Behavioral Cancer Prevention and Control Research: Summer Training Accelerating and Nurturing the Development of Outstanding Undergraduate Trainees

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PROJECT SUMMARY Modifiable behavioral factors, including tobacco use, alcohol consumption, diet, exercise, and sun exposure, account for up to 75% of cancer cases and figure prominently in response to treatments and risk of relapse. In addition, heightened risk for cancer, as well as the diagnosis and treatment of cancer, often come with significant harms to psychological functioning and quality of life, which in turn may adversely affect cancer outcomes. Despite decades of research on behavioral aspects of cancer prevention and control (BCPC), many individuals continue to engage in risky behaviors, and many continue to bear the considerable psychological burdens associated with cancer risk, diagnosis, treatment and survival. Major barriers to continued progress in this area include: 1) the relatively small fraction of scientists who focus their work on BCPC, 2) a lack of awareness of BCPC career opportunities when college students consider their advanced educational options, 3) a lack of opportunities to receive formal early training in BCPC research, and 4) a lack of stewardship of outstanding college students to help them transition from research labs to successful graduate education. Moreover, BCPC scientists are increasingly unprepared to tackle the unique behavioral and psychological challenges faced by an increasingly culturally diverse population. The program aims to address these critical training gaps by providing 15-week immersive summer research, mentoring, and career development experiences for outstanding undergraduates (n=16/summer) from the City University of New York (CUNY), the largest urban university system in the U.S. With all of its eleven senior colleges federally-designated minority-serving institutions, the diverse and talented CUNY student body provides an ideal pool of dedicated, promising young scholars to benefit from the proposed program. We will match outstanding students with behavioral scientists from CUNY's Hunter College (HC), or the nearby Center for Behavioral Oncology at the renowned Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (ISMMS), with which HC maintains close collaborations. The program will go beyond simple summer lab experiences, offering collaborative multidisciplinary idea-generation projects, biweekly career development meetings as a cohort, creating opportunities for students to develop lasting relationships with experts in the field, as well as future colleagues, and provide critical transitional mentoring during the process of applying for graduate education. Connecting with the next generation of scientists from an early stage and shepherding them through the challenging transition from undergraduate to advanced education is a critical step supporting the continuity of trainees' development that is all too often ignored. We will also leverage the considerable resources of HC's larger NIH-funded Cancer Health Disparities Partnership, which will provide scaffolding and infrastructure to efficiently execute the program. Finally, we will conduct ongoing, rigorous multifocal outcome evaluations to determine the effectiveness of the program and make real-time programmatic adjustments as needed.