Career Enhancement Program

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PROJECT SUMMARY The goal of the Lymphoma SPORE’s Career Enhancement Program is to provide support for young investigators pursuing careers in translational lymphoma research as well as for established investigators who wish to refocus their work on lymphoma. The program is led by Drs. Helen Heslop, Martha Mims and Sid Ganguly and will be co-ordinated by the Administrative Core with oversight from the Executive Committee and Internal and External Advisory Boards. Continually improved throughout the previous funding cycles, our established Career Enhancement Program has well-defined processes and for candidate recruitment. We will continue to collaborate with the Baylor Office of Diveristy, Equity, and Inclusion to devote significant effort to recruit women and minorities to our program and the field of lymphoma research — an initiative that has been successful in the past funding periods when 53% of trainees were female and 37% were under-represented minorities (Hispanic or African American). Both MD and PhD trainees will be able to take advantage of courses available through the Clinical Scientist Training Program at Baylor College of Medicine and will have a strong group of mentors with broad translational expertise. We have developed mentoring strategies focued on the unique challenges of moving cell and gene therapies from the bench-to-the-bedside, as well as the dynamics of team science, that enhance the overall training program. Specifically, these strategies include providing trainees with multiple mentors that possess complementary skills, individualized training plans, and multiple opportunities to participate in learning courses and attend lectures relevant to the field. Additionally, trainees have access to the SPORE cores (Clinical Research and Biostatistics, Cell Processing and Vector Production, Biospecimen and Pathology) with unique expertise in cell and gene therapy and clinical research. In the last 14 years,19 awardees have been selected for this Program, seven of whom are now incorporated into the SPORE program with 4 as project leaders in the current renewal . This Program will therefore ensure that the SPORE will continue to train promising investigators who will contribute to translational lymphoma research into the future.