NIA Short Term Research Training: Students in Health Professional Schools

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The Yale School of Medicine has a strong record of accomplishments in training medical students for careers in academic medicine and research. Yale is also home to several world-renowned, aging-focused research centers. We are therefore ideally poised to address the critical shortage of physician-scientists trained in aging across the translational spectrum. This resubmission application is for a competitive renewal of NIA support for medical students (NIA Short-Term Training: Students in Health Professional Schools). The purpose of the grant application is to provide intensive short-term training in research for selected pre-doctoral medical students in outstanding aging-focused laboratories and training sites at the Yale School of Medicine by providing qualified Yale medical students to research experiences in biomedical sciences in areas of interest to NIA. Notably, since we were awarded our first NIA T35, there has been more than a 50% increase in the number of Yale medical students conducting aging-focused research. Therefore, we have achieved our goal of catalyzing student interest in this area and in the next funding period will continue this momentum as follows. Trainees will be medical students who have completed at least one year of medical school curriculum. Ten students per year will be selected for this short-term training support based on the quality of a formal written proposal of the planned research and the quality of the mentor and the training environment. The Program will be supported by Yale’s Program on Aging and will provide students with the opportunity to receive mentored research training from aging-focused investigators at our institution. Participating departments and sections will include anesthesia, comparative medicine, internal medicine (sections of geriatrics, cardiovascular medicine, endocrinology, general medicine, infectious diseases, pulmonary, rheumatology), emergency medicine, neurology, neuroscience, orthopedics & rehabilitation, psychiatry, public health (sections of health policy, and social & behavioral sciences), and surgery (section of vascular). A carefully designed program of mentorship, supplemented by a formal didactic program, will ensure that students receive rigorous training in aging research that is appropriate for their stage of training. By providing students with access to a diverse pool of mentors with projects ranging from experimental and laboratory research to outcomes, health services, and community-engaged research across many clinical disciplines, we are well poised to offer medical students short term research training in NIA related domains. The proposed training program can inspire and facilitate the eventual pursuit of academic careers in aging by supporting research and scholarly experiences focused on aging early in students’ training to which they may not have otherwise had access.