BRITE Veterinary Student Program

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 DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The Basic Research Immersion Training Experience (BRITE) Program provides talented veterinary students a research-oriented, laboratory-based, graduate experience with the ultimate goal of attracting veterinarians into biomedical research careers. The BRITE program faculty and administration are dedicated to train veterinarian-scientists in a unique spectrum of biomedical research involving infectious disease, translational physiology, and comparative biomedicine, under an umbrella that bridges genotype-phenotype relationships. The pool of BRITE mentors includes productive, well-funded faculty members with primary academic appointments in four colleges and eight departments at Kansas State University. The specific goals of the program are to provide select veterinary students with: (1) graduate research experiences in the biomedical laboratories of outstanding scientists; and (2) mentored opportunities regarding critical thinking processes inherent to grant writing and hypothesis-driven research, methodologies intrinsic to the design and execution of laboratory experiments and clinical trials, and ethical issues fundamental to the responsible conduct of biomedical research. Strategies have been implemented in the current NIH T32 funding cycle to enhance the utilization of the Veterinary Research Scholars Program (VRSP, NIH T35-funded) as a feeder for the BRITE (NIH T32-funded) program and to develop a funded DVM-PhD program. The VRSP (NIH T35), BRITE (NIH T32), and DVM-PhD programs are now situated as sequentially-positioned, intrinsically-coupled training programs that provide a unique and robust research environment for veterinary trainees. In addition, Kansas State University is in an unprecedented research development and growth phase that includes the opening of the Biosecurity Research Institute, the on-going construction of the National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility, the continued development of the Animal Health Corridor (home to the world's largest concentration of animal health companies), and initial considerations for the development of a Regional Center for Veterinary Comparative Medicine. The future scientific and research needs of these extensive and varied university, public, and private entities will be substantial and will require highly-trained veterinarian-scientists. The current renewal application requests programmatic support for one predoctoral NIH-funded BRITE student per year for the next five years. BRITE students devote an academic year to biomedical research. The BRITE research experience is coupled with earning a Master's Degree in Veterinary Biomedical Sciences, a College of Veterinary Medicine-based interdisciplinary graduate program. The combined Kansas State University College of Veterinary Medicine programs (VRSP; BRITE; DVM-PhD) are uniquely positioned to provide highly-trained veterinarian-scientists that can make seminal contributions to important areas of human and animal research that are of significant national interest.