Research Education Component

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PROJECT SUMMARY - RESEARCH EDUCATION COMPONENT The Northwestern ADRC, and the Mesulam Center within which it operates, have a solid tradition of mentoring and training doctoral candidates, post-doctoral fellows and junior faculty in an interactive multidisciplinary setting that provides research training through immersive activities and breadth of knowledge and skills through a significant array of didactic educational modalities related to aging and AD/ADRD. During the past cycle, the Research Education Component (REC) of the Northwestern ADRC has accrued much experience and provided research education in aging and AD/ADRD to a large number of trainees. In the next cycle, the overall goal of the Northwestern ADRC REC will be to optimize the training of a workforce to meet the nation’s biomedical, behavioral and clinical needs in aging and AD/ADRD. The REC will have a broad mandate that will interact with the activities of all other ADRC components and will be guided by the following goals: 1) Provide cross-disciplinary research education for three research associates and junior faculty per year (REC Scholars) through innovative multidisciplinary mechanisms designed to bridge the gap between clinical and basic research experience in aging and AD/ADRD, with a stipend to provide time for training. 2) Provide research education training for at least two REC Affiliates per year, similar to the training provided to REC Scholars, but without a stipend. 3) Provide immersive research experiences and didactic training for at least five students per year at various levels of education, with concentration on underrepresented minorities, as a means of enhancing the pipeline for the future workforce in AD/ADRD. In keeping with the overall theme of our ADRC, the REC program will emphasize the heterogeneity of brain aging and dementia so that basic scientists are exposed to the complexity of the clinical presentations and translate clinical findings into mechanistic studies, while clinicians appreciate the heterogeneity of the underlying biological phenomena and translate basic findings into clinical research. The REC will be leveraged by the extensive infrastructure of the Northwestern Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute (NUCATS), with an extensive array of programs, including courses in Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR), and the Northwestern University Graduate School, including the Northwestern University Interdepartmental Neuroscience Program (NUIN), and the McGaw Medical Center of Northwestern Feinberg School of Medicine, for diversity recruitment. REC will also organize the curriculum for didactic training modalities and will review the background and career aspirations of trainees in order to ensure that clinicians become exposed to basic research and basic researchers become exposed to clinical realities.