The Intervention Research Training Program for Cancer Prevention is an ongoing three year cancer prevention postdoctoral training program for physicians and other health care-related professionals that is aimed at developing investigators with new research skills focused on the design and implementation of cancer prevention and/or control research. The program is multidisciplinary and collaborative in respect to its faculty and training approach, the research projects of trainees, and the backgrounds of the trainees themselves. The program enrolls two trainees each year who are fellows of junior faculty based out of various departments in the Bowman Gray School of Medicine and programs in the Comprehensive Cancer Center of Wake Forest University. The training program, which provides support for up to three years, combines formal course work and thesis research (leading to publication) that leads to an M.S. degree in epidemiology, and hands-on experience in cancer prevention and control research under the guidance of well-qualified preceptors with a large, peer-reviewed, funded research base. All fellows receive formal training in cancer biology, cancer prevention, public health and behavioral sciences, and in advanced methods of cancer prevention/control research. The program provides practical training in all the principal activities of prevention research including development of a research question/testable hypothesis, systematic and critical literature review, identification of a research mentor and constructing a multidisciplinary research team, selecting a research design, ethics in research, guidelines for the use of humans in research, grantsmanship, conducting research, analyzing data, interpreting findings and putting them into context with findings of others, reporting results in journals and at scientific meetings, and building a research program. All fellows will have an opportunity to gain experience working with multidisciplinary collaborative studies involving biomarkers of risk and exposure, intermediate endpoints for cancer, chemoprevention, diet and cancer, cancer etiology and primary prevention, gene-environment interaction, secondary prevention/screening for cancer at both individual and population levels of intervention, investigations in non-human primates for immediate translation into human studies, and clinical research study populations that emphasize the under-served, elderly, women, and minorities. This program addresses the goal of the National Cancer Institute to broaden the research infrastructure of cancer prevention and control by increasing the number of well-trained scientists in the field.

R25CA057707

1992-09-01

2003-08-31