As the educational core of the Institute of Clinical and Translational Sciences (ICTS), the Clinical Research Training Center (CRTC) provides a cohesive and supportive infrastructure to foster clinical and translational research training and career development for undergraduate scholars, postbaccalaureate scholars, predoctoral trainees, postdoctoral scholars, fellows, staff, and junior faculty.
Active mentoring, hands-on research experiences and formal didactic programs in clinical research methods leading to a Certificate or Master’s Degree in Clinical Investigation are core components of the Center’s activities. The CRTC represents a paradigm shift in the approach to clinical research training for ICTS institutional partners by formally integrating dozens of diverse training programs into a single location and administrative umbrella.
The mission of the CRTC is to provide outstanding clinical and translational research training. This is accomplished by:
- Integrating and enhancing existing training programs
- Developing new clinical and translational courses
- Promoting multidisciplinary team training
- Developing new career development programs
- Providing improved evaluation and tracking for all training programs
- Providing mechanisms and infrastructure for sharing best practices, including educational resources and materials, curriculums, evaluation materials, recruitment strategies and materials to track trainees, mentors, faculty and the training programs.
Additional Training programs have been designed to cover various facets of both levels of translational research (from the lab to clinical practice and from clinical practice to community application). These programs include topics such as Good Clinical Practice, differences between investigator-led and industry-sponsored studies, entrepreneurial aspects of intellectual property development, strategies for recruitment and retention of research study participants, techniques for community-based research, and addressing differences in health outcomes.