The UT Southwestern Infectious Diseases Research Training Program

About This Grant

PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT The University of Texas Southwestern (UTSW) Medical Center is one of the premier academic medical centers in the world and requests support for a new research training program focused on training physician-scientists in the field of infectious diseases. The UT Southwestern Infectious Diseases (UTID) Research Training program will support 2 post-doctoral trainees for a two-year training period every year. The novel design of the UTID training program utilizes cross-campus recruitment for physician scientists working in the field of infectious diseases to create a large pool of candidates. Once recruited, trainees have an extensive interdisciplinary mentorship and a program-specific ID research training program that includes mentors and resources from 9 different departments, divisions, centers, and institutes across the medical campus. The 29 trainers have broad training and are comprised of a core group of highly accomplished, established investigators along with an expanding and impressive group of new and junior faculty mentors that embodies the intradisciplinary research programs across the UTID Training program that are bound by a common interest in combating infectious diseases. The UTID training program serves as an important focus for formal interactions among this overlapping group of talented trainers who have strong records of research success and outstanding records of training physicians and scientists. Our goal is to train post-doctoral physician-scientists for research careers in the molecular basis of microbial pathogenesis, cellular microbiology, host-defense mechanisms, regulation of virulence, structural biology, and clinical research. The research interests of the faculty include bacterial and viral pathogenesis, innate and adaptive immunity, antimicrobial therapeutic discovery, parasitology, RNA biology, and structural biology. The UTID Research Training program provides a strong emphasis on molecular mechanisms, molecular biology, and fundamental quantitative scientific approaches. Trainees who complete the program are expected to apply state-of-the-art molecular approaches to address important current and future problems in the field of infectious diseases. This training program will produce highly trained physician-scientists to address current and future challenges in the field of infectious diseases and immunology. This new program will also provide a pipeline for academic infectious disease research faculty for the region and throughout the US.