Career Enhancement Program

The NAMDC Career Enhancement Program consists of the following components: 1. The NAMDC Fellowship Program which offers a unique training opportunity to senior postdoctoral clinical fellows who we anticipate will move on to the attending/assistant professor level in an academic setting as well-trained clinician scientists. The focus is on translational medicine, teaching of diagnostic expertise and the development of clinical trials expertise. We aim to train the first of a new generation of clinician scientists who will be well equipped to move the promising new treatments for mitochondrial disease into the clinical arena. Ten training sites are collaborating in this program. These sites; Columbia, San Diego, Seattle, Cleveland, Hamilton, CHOP, Baylor, University of Colorado, Mayo Clinic and the University of Florida are all leading institutions in the field of mitochondrial medicine. World renowned faculty are to be found at each site. Our current fellow will and 2 prior fellows have participated in RDCRN training course where they present a summary of their work. 2. The fellowship program is held together by telemedicine conferences involving all consortium sites with monthly Zoom video conferencing. These conferences are well attended by faculty, students and NIH representatives. Participation is offered to RDCRN trainees. 3. Career enhancements include (A) The addition of a didactic core lecture series on Clinical Trial readiness which will be available as an online lecture series. Dr. Peter Stacpoole at the University of Florida has volunteered to head this course development. He has many years of NIH and industry sponsored clinical trials experience. (B) The directors of the 10 Career Enhancement Sites have agreed to post a comprehensive series of lectures on management of mitochondrial disease. (C) The Mitochondrial Medicine Society (MMS) is currently developing a series of organ-specific mitochondrial disease lectures to be CME- certified by the UMDF and made available on-line. 4. Funds to be provided by the UMDF will be used to attract young physicians, medical students, MD/PhD students and recent graduates heading to medical school to the field of mitochondrial medicine. We plan to provide $20K individual grants annually to candidates in 2 of our NAMDC Career Enhancement Sites. Proposals will be reviewed by a committee of Site Directors along with the UMDF grant review process. In addition, an annual retreat will take place on the day following the UMDF annual meeting where the awardees and the NAMDC fellow can interact with and present their work to the site directors.