Establishing a Fellowship Training Program at the Nexus of Implementation Science and Health Equity

Project Description Narrative:

This project aims to support health workforce development by training scientists to deploy methods to increase the speed from discovery to impact. On average, it takes 17 years for a new discovery—such as a pill to prevent HIV—to become routinely used in healthcare. This delay can severely affect the health of communities and often results in widening disparities in poor health outcomes by race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and urbanicity, among other population segments. Methods to bridge the gap from discovery to impact fall within the scope of Implementation Science. Leveraging evidence-based approaches to bring new developments to clinical practice requires a unique skillset not currently taught in most medical and graduate school curricula. Additional post-doctoral training is often required to fill this gap.

This project involves the development of an 18-month training program offering hands-on experience in prevention and implementation sciences with a focus on grant writing, community engagement, health equity, and reducing health disparities. The project team brings a history of success mentoring pre-doctoral graduate and medical students within the Prevention and Implementation Sciences and Training Lab—an interdisciplinary training program we aim to expand to postdoctoral and early career research fellows.

The impact of the training program will include recruitment and retention of at least one new postdoc and five MCW-based, early-career researchers to participate as fellows; six fellow-led project proposals submitted for external grant funding aiming to improve the health of Wisconsin residents; increased diversity of investigators with training in implementation science at MCW; and submission of a grant proposal to NIH to support long-term sustainability of this workforce development program.