Education/Training and Outreach Activities

California Institute Of Technology, Pasadena CA

Investigators

Linked publications & trials

Abstract

NSBCC education & training programs are designed to bring cancer researchers together with physical scientists and technologists in order to expedite the develoment of new and effective tools for fighting cancer. Our goal is to have student and postdoctoral researchers who understand the cancer biology or clinical oncology problem, can participate in technology invention, development, and validation, and then can demonstrate the value of the technology in pre-clinical settings and hopefully via participation in human studies. We describe one-on-one mentorship programs within our individual projects designed to bothfacilitate such training, but also catalyze the collaboratory effort. We also describe three NSBCC short courses, taught at each of the participating institutions, that are designed to teach our researchers key fundamental aspects associated with NSBCC-developed technologies, as well as NSBCC ongoing projects. These courses, designed for non-specialists, are complemented with in depth courses designed for more specialist students that are offered at the participating institutions. We also describe internal educational activities that include student and postdoc participation in our annual retreat, biweekly NSBCC Project meetings, site reviews and national CCNE meetings. Mechanisms to facilitate intra- and inter-CCNE collaborations. The educational programs are overseen by our Internal Review Council and annually reviewed by our External Advisory Board. Outreach programs to the local oncology community are enabled via our IMED Core, and additional outreach programs to underrepresented minority students and industry are described. Finally, we describe our outreach to the global community via public data base sharing, publication, and public communication forums.