CCTS Eduction Program Highlight

The CCTS has offered a variety of training programs over the last several months through Research Education, Training and Career Development program. The Research Mentor Training Workshop has been a core education program for many years. This past academic year, the CCTS offered three Mentor Training workshops. Thirty-eight faculty attended these highly interactive programs facilitated by Jennifer Garvin, PhD, Lisa Christian, PhD, and Jennifer Muszynski, MD. All attendees reported enhancing their mentoring skills. One participant commented,

The curriculum used in the workshops was developed by the Center for Improvement of Mentored Experiences in Research, and the CCTS was one of the original institutions that piloted the curriculum. Three more workshops are planned for the next academic year, and faculty from across the health sciences and especially those working on training grants or with researchers on training grants are encouraged to attend. Stay tuned for more information in the coming weeks.

This spring, the education program debuted a new series of Tools of the Trade programs on Comparative Translational Research. These programs are designed to highlight the power of spontaneous animal models of disease in developing therapies and other treatments. This series is presented in collaboration with the CCTS’s Comparative and Translational Medicine program, whose director, Sarah Moore, DVM, presented along with Devina Purmessur, PhD, from the College of Medicine in a program on their collaborative research using dogs with degenerative disc disease in the development of a new therapy. A subsequent program described how Ian Davis and Anda Young, both of the College of Veterinary Medicine, used dogs in the Vet School ICU to test a new treatment for acute respiratory failure. All of these presentations were recorded and can be found on the CCTS website. More programs are planned for the fall, including a comparative cancer project and a description of testing a wearable joint monitoring device on dogs

Finally, recognizing the need among faculty for training in grant management, the CCTS invited Karla Gengler-Nowak, about as experienced a grants manager as one is likely to find, to present a series of programs on financial management tools available to researchers and how to use them to manage their grants. Karla is currently Grants and Contracts Administrator at the College of Optometry, but her career has taken her to the Office of Sponsored Programs and the College of Medicine. Over seventy faculty and staff attended these informative programs, which are now available to be watched at any time on the CCTS website.

The education program will have more trainings to offer starting in the fall semester. Look for announcements about our new T32 predoctoral training program, as well as about the talented students and faculty supported by CCTS training grants.