Indiana Stimulating Access to Research in Residency (I-StARR)

SUMMARY Housed at the Indiana University School of Medicine (IUSM), the country’s largest medical school, the Indiana Stimulating Access to Research in Residency (I-StARR) program aims to train residents in research methods focused on understanding and reducing health disparities in cardiovascular and pulmonary diseases. We focus on primary care residency programs because their graduates enter clinical practice at the frontline of prevention and treatment of highly prevalent cardiovascular, pulmonary, and related diseases. Despite the availability of postdoctoral research training programs for clinician-investigators, programs tend to be linked to subspecialty fellowships and do not engage trainees from primary care. Consequently, very few primary care physicians purse research careers. I-StARR will recruit and train resident-physicians from residencies in Family Medicine, general Internal Medicine, general Pediatrics, Medicine-Pediatrics, and general Obstetrics- Gynecology. Over the five-year period of the award, I-StARR will train up to 12 resident-investigators, to be recruited among the 446 residents of the five participating residencies. Our goal is to provide high quality research skills training to place early-career clinicians on a structured pathway from resident-investigator to clinician-investigator, equipping them with research skills and grant writing expertise along the way. We will accomplish this by (1) enrolling residents in existing didactics in research methods, (2) providing career development experiences, including a new grant writing curriculum for I-StARR residents, and (3) matching resident-investigators with research preceptors for hands-on mentored research experiences for a minimum of 12 months at 80 percent effort. We designed I-StARR in three interdisciplinary tracks: clinical and translational research, health services research, and community-engaged research. With a strategic focus on recruiting residents with diverse backgrounds and experiences, we will train research preceptors in Culturally Aware Mentoring. Grant-writing coaching and mentoring training will follow evidence-based best practices of the NIH- funded National Research Mentoring Network. The evaluation arm of I-StARR will continuously monitor all components and characteristics of the training program and incorporate feedback for quality improvement from internal and external advisory boards. Applying a health disparities lens to the focus on cardiovascular and pulmonary diseases, I-StARR will enable clinician-investigators to devise more effective intervention strategies to improve population health especially for disadvantaged and marginalized populations.