Admin Supplement: Combined Engineering and Orthopaedics Training Program

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The goals of the Combined Engineering and Orthopaedics T32 Training Program are to identify, train, and empower a select group of high potential investigators to utilize the principles of engineering to advance patient care through interdisciplinary research while nurturing them to become successful academic and clinical leaders in the musculoskeletal and orthopaedic sciences. The orthopaedic conditions studied and researched by our T32 trainees, and across our institution, are known to cause both acute and chronic pain, however, our training program does not provide any training program related to pain. As such, this supplement is a tremendous opportunity for us to leverage new initiatives on pain and new faculty connections across our institution so that our trainees can consider pain across the spectrum of translational animal models to patients, with a view to empowering our trainees to incorporate pain into their pre-doctoral and post-doctoral clinically impactful research. The goals of this supplement are to: (i) expand the scope of trainees’ learning experience and inspire burgeoning interdisciplinary pain researchers, (ii) enhance the clinical relevance and impact of trainee’s research projects by incorporating pain measurement, (iii) afford opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration by linking trainees and their mentors with clinical pain researchers. To achieve these goals, we propose: (I) a structured Translational Pain Research Training Program (hereafter referred to as Pain-Train) which will be developed in months 1-5, rolled out to our six pre-doctoral and two post-doctoral trainees and interested residents, fellows, attendings, scientists and clinician-scientists and their trainees in months 6-12, and offered to researchers and clinicians outside of HSS thereafter, and (II) adding one additional pre-doctoral trainee enrolled in a PhD/ DVM graduate program at Cornell, whose research is currently focused on pain mechanisms in osteoarthritis using canine and mouse models. With a clear focus on understanding the basic mechanisms of pain, developing models to study those mechanisms, and considering outcome measures that can be used across the translational continuum, we will connect and educate our trainees and leverage the programming developed to empower us, our faculty, and trainees to ultimately improve health equity of all populations suffering from pain caused by musculoskeletal diseases.