Pathways to Careers in Clinical and Translational Research (PACCTR)
The PACCTR Program supports clinical research training for medical, dental, nursing and pharmacy pre-doctoral students for short-term (two or three month) and intensive (one-year or two-year) fellowships. The short-term fellowships provide an introduction to clinical research and stimulate the student to acquire further training in clinical research—ideally an intensive fellowship—before graduation. The intensive research fellowships provide a more detailed exposure to clinical research and are designed to stimulate the students to take one of the K fellowships after further clinical training. Medical students participating in the one-year program write a thesis based on their work and graduate with an "MD with Thesis" designation. Students participating in the two-year program are awarded a Masters in Clinical Research degree.
Goals
-
To increase awareness of clinical research among all students to prepare them to optimally utilize emerging clinical research data throughout their professional career
-
To provide outstanding didactic training to PACCTR students through the existing array of clinical research training resources at UCSF, including the K-30 and Roadmap-K12 programs
-
To provide a practicum research experience that uses their newly acquired knowledge in clinical research design. We achieve this by:
-
fostering relationships with experienced mentors from different disciplines
-
ensuring appropriate research settings with access to clinical populations, existing databases and specimen banks, and scientific and administrative infrastructure
-
offering access to core methodology experts in study design and coordination, social and behavioral sciences, data management and statistics, and a support group of peers in offices in a Shared Clinical Research Support Facility
-
-
To enhance the existing core curriculum in clinical research for all UCSF students with a combination of PACCTR-sponsored small group sessions and web-based learning tools; and to foster sharing of ideas, resources and faculty across schools for this purpose