Clinical Research Training Center

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 predoctoral students, house-staff, postdoctoral fellows, staff, and 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, minority recruitment strategies and materials to track trainees, mentors, faculty and the training programs. Additional training has been developed to address the broad spectrum of both levels of translational research (bench to bedside and bedside to community) including issues of Good Clinical Practice, investigator sponsored versus industry sponsored studies, entrepreneurial issues of intellectual property development, recruitment and retention of research study participants, understanding and overcoming cultural barriers, methods of community based research, and reducing health disparities.