Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine Undergraduate Research Addressing Challenges in Kidney and Urologic Diseases

Enter the text here that is the new abstract information for your application. This section must be no longer than 30 lines of text. Summer Undergraduate Research Institute for Meeting Challenges in Urologic and Kidney Disease Research – Premise and Hypothesis: We hypothesize that the proposed summer institute program of multidisciplinary undergraduate research at the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine (WFIRM), addressing challenges in kidney and urologic diseases (KUD), utilizing tissue engineering and regenerative medicine strategies coupled with specialized education and career evaluation interventions (measured by pre and post-assessment instruments) will enhance student participants’ career intentions and perceptions and increase matriculation into graduate PhD and MD/PhD work and ultimately, careers in nephrology and urology. This new summer institute program at the WFIRM will provide cohorts of 8 undergraduate students each summer (2020- 2025) with interdisciplinary research opportunities in tissue engineering and regenerative medicine (TERM) focused on addressing challenges in KUD research. The core feature of the program is an intensive research experience under the guidance of prominent and committed researchers at WFIRM, a research institute within Wake Forest University Health Sciences (WFUHS), together with the Virginia Tech- Wake Forest School of Biomedical Engineering and Sciences (VT-WF SBES) and the WFSM Department of Urology. Undergraduates will have a mentored short-term focused experience with prominent faculty and near- peer graduate student mentors to acquire a fundamental understanding of the underlying biological and engineering principles of TERM, along with intensive training in state-of-the-art methods of kidney and urology research. TERM research topics included are identified as high-priority research by a number of federal agencies, including the NIH. Students’ active research experiences will be further enhanced with a combination of hands-on and “virtual” research activities, instrumentation training, didactic educational components, specialized workshops, seminars and mini courses available across the participating departments and centers and other funded NIDDK R25 programs, spanning bioethics, responsible conduct of research, oral and written communication, and program-tailored education and career development perceptions and intentions interventions.