Frontiers in Emerging, Reemerging and Zoonotic Diseases and Diversity (FrERZD2)

PROJECT SUMMARY Our nation is nearly paralyzed by the twin pandemics of COVID-19 and painful inequities in health outcomes among COVID-19 infected Americans of differing ethnicities. To help address these, we seek sponsorship to train the next generation of pandemic and emerging disease researchers in the FRONTIERS IN EMERGING, RE-EMERGING AND ZOONOTIC DISEASES AND DIVERSITY. FrERZD2 will launch and sustain three vital undertakings: sophisticated courses for skills development; relevant vital research experiences; and career mentoring activities. Responsive to PAR-20-289, it is designed for 16 trainees who are graduate and medical students, medical residents, postdoctoral fellows, and/or early-career faculty, and who also are US citizens or permanent residents. The week-long course will help to ensure that clinically active scientists (especially physicians) are able to obtain permission to participate. Too few laboratories are led by under-represented minority (URM) scientists, and not enough new URM trainees graduate. We seek 5 years of sponsorship to offer FrERZD2 courses at Morehouse School of Medicine (MSM), an HBCU, in 2021, 2023, and 2025 and Ponce Health Sciences University (PHSU), a Hispanic-Serving Institution, in 2022 and 2024. Under the overall directorship of Gerald Schatten from Pittsburgh, along with Jonathan Stiles at MSM, Idhaliz Flores from PHSU, and Calvin Simerly, also from Pittsburgh, FrERZD2 is overseen by an external scientific advisory committee. It offers dynamic advanced training courses consisting of daily lectures on emerging concepts, followed by extended discussion, laboratory research, technologically intense workshops, and informal seminars. Our similar training programs have recruited participants of whom 34% self-identify as African American/Black and 30% as Hispanic Americans; 66% are women, and 62% are from URM institutions. Six specific aims are proposed. Aim 1. Provide conceptual education and experimental training. Aim 2. Provide background information and self-reflective exercises and demonstrations to understand, appreciate, and address the historic and current underpinnings of inequities in the research workforce’s diversity and disparities in health care. Aim 3. Sponsor meaningful mentored research. Aim 4. Discuss career planning. Aim 5. Educate participants on the responsible conduct of research. Aim 6. Provide unbiased, quantitative, independent mechanisms to track trainees’ careers, comprehensively and longitudinally. The program’s name, FRONTIERS IN EMERGING, RE-EMERGING AND ZOONOTIC DISEASES AND DIVERSITY, acknowledges our hope that the COVID pandemic may soon recede significantly and our realization that other emerging, reemerging, and zoonotic diseases will arise that must be timely addressed. Overall, in conducting this program, we will continue to enhance and expand the research careers of the most promising scientists, with sensitivity to ensuring full diversity in the NIAID workforce.