Research Education Component

Research Education Component (REC): Project Summary The long-term objective of the Research Education Component (REC) is the establishment of a cadre of well- trained, highly motivated junior faculty who will become leaders and mentors in scholarship on frailty and aging and its translation to maintain independence, health and robustness for older adults. The REC accomplishes this objective through four specific aims: 1) It provides an education program combining subject-area, methodological and leadership training together with mentorship having both team-based and one-on-one elements and a mentored research project, so as to promote, benchmark, and assure research progress and career development. 2) It partners with the Leadership Council to identify, attract, and select outstanding junior faculty from multiple disciplines with the interest and potential to become future scholarly leaders on frailty and aging. 3) It provides the research infrastructure, salary support and protected time essential to enable the selected trainees to successfully bridge the critical transition to independent grant funding. 4) It creates a welcoming academic home and ‘stimulus zone’ for junior faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and predoctoral students invested in frailty-related scholarship through a variety of forums for ongoing networking and intellectual enrichment where they can interact with each other together and senior OAIC faculty. Forums provided complement structured mentorship plans for supported faculty and include monthly sessions in which REC-, PESC- and DP-supported faculty present research-in-progress, twice-monthly meetings of the Frailty and Multisystem Dysregulation research working group, and sponsorship of other working group meetings, seminars and guest lectures in collaboration with partnering institutional resources on aging. REC-supported faculty receive full mentorial and material support from each resource core, as appropriate to their interests and needs. Information dissemination infrastructure overseen by the LAC provides supported faculty with avenues by which to disseminate their findings. Resources are prioritized, first, to K-eligible individuals, followed by R-eligible individuals and then to other trainees so as to direct Core efforts to provide support at a key transitional point, when research careers are often in jeopardy because of lack of funding and research infrastructure. The leadership of this Core and the OAIC as a whole will continue to emphasize training across disciplines and that bridges basic science and clinical investigation. The overall approach we propose has achieved notable success as evidenced by the accomplishments and success in receipt of career development awards of previously supported faculty.