Postdoctoral Training Program in Alcohol Studies

This renewal application is for five years of continued support of the Postdoctoral Training Program in Alcohol Studies at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine (UConn Health). The program was established in 1980 and evolves with this renewal with transitions and additions among training faculty and new resources to meet the needs of the next generation of scientists committed to understanding and reducing harms from alcohol use and related consequences. To accomplish this, this program takes a collaborative, interdisciplinary, and cross-campus (UConn Health, University of Connecticut (UConn-Storrs)) approach with faculty representing numerous departments including psychiatry, computer science and engineering, behavioral sciences and community health, medicine, and public health sciences. Our program continues to be focused on alcohol. It also recognizes that alcohol use, intervention and treatment often occur in the context of other substance use and comorbidities, and program faculty have substantial expertise in these areas. Moreover, there is new attention to training opportunities in: mentoring, structural and interpersonal factors in alcohol use and misuse; data science; mobile technologies; and social media research. Further, while training faculty have considerable experience in mentoring, supplemental training in best practices in mentoring and contemporary issues is planned, for faculty and trainees. Throughout, an Executive Advisory Committee composed of internal and external members will contribute to program oversight and evaluation. This program provides three postdoctoral fellows with individualized and multimodal training for typically two and up to three years. Fellows will select from four Core Research Areas in clinical and translational research: (1) Intervention, Treatment and Recovery; (2) Etiology, Risk Factors and Comorbidities, (3) Health Services, Implementation Science, and Translational research, and (4) Gut Microbiome, Liver Disease and Immunology. Our Addiction Science and Principles of Clinical and Translational Research curriculums are examples of formal coursework. Faculty collaborators and opportunities at external institutions will be available to extend training further. Fellows will be assigned a primary and possibly a secondary mentor, based on similar research interests across the core and elective areas. The primary mentor will provide instruction in methods, design, analysis, and ethics of alcohol research within the trainee's core research area(s) and lead the trainee’s progress on achieving program and personal professional milestones. Secondary mentors will do the same for their research area. Expectations for trainees will be to: 1) produce at least two first authored publications per year of training, 2) initiate and complete an independent or collaborative research project, 3) present research at RSA and other scientific conferences, and 4) prepare a grant application by the end of the training period. Given our successes in these objectively measured standards with recent trainees, this program is well-poised to train the next generation of alcohol researchers.