Institutional Career Development Core

The goal for our proposed KL2 Mentored Career Development Award Program is to maintain excellence and mentorship program that imparts the skills essential to conduct clinical and translational science in the era of interdisciplinary team science, precision medicine (PM), big data, and implementation science. At Columbia University Irving Medical Center (CUIMC), the KL2 program operates across schools, departments, and divisions as the only institution- wide disease-agnostic career development program in clinical and translational research. The Irving Institute's translational workforce development (TWD) of clinician and non-clinician scientists is centered in TRANSFORM (TRaining And Nurturing Scholars For Research that is Multidisciplinary), which oversees the Institutional Career Development Core (KL2 Mentored Career Development Award Program). The goal is to recruit individuals who conduct cutting edge and clinically relevant research regardless of the disease focus. Recruitment will focus on investigators from diverse backgrounds with research or health professional doctorates in medicine, surgery, nursing, dentistry, public health, psychiatry, arts and sciences, and engineering. The KL2 program will promote career development, translational capabilities, and collaborative and entrepreneurial skills of junior faculty from diverse disciplines who have recently finished research or health professional doctoral training. KL2 graduates will receive excellent and extensive career mentoring, and gain expertise in advanced clinical and translational research methods and comprehensive experimental approaches. This mentoring and training will allow KL2 scholars to compete more effectively for external funding, enhance their effective participation in interdisciplinary teams, and contribute to prevention and treatment of diseases through clinical and translational research. Our KL2 graduates will also be able to pay forward these skills through training and mentorship of the next generation of scientists. As such, the Specific Aims are: Aim 1. To continue our successful and innovative KL2 career development program and develop new programs to enhance the ability of our KL2 scholars to engage in and lead interdisciplinary team science and translate new discoveries to benefit our patients and communities. Aim 2. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the KL2 program through continuous comprehensive and systematic evaluation and quality improvement using key metrics, including Common Metrics, to optimize the impact of our educational and workforce development programs. Aim 3. To accelerate the dissemination of our training approaches to our partners at Columbia University (CU), the regional tri-state consortium (TriCon) of Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) Program hubs and network, and the clinical and translational while enhancing and innovating our successful junior faculty training field at large.