Professional development programs for early career investigators

Early career investigators today are challenged to succeed in a world of exceptionally competitive, rapidly changing, as well as generally declining, extramural funding resources. It has become apparent that in order to be successful, most new investigators require additional career development mentoring and grantsmanship training, compared to their peers of only a few years ago. Thus, it has become imperative for academic institutions and their established senior faculty to provide new mechanisms of training and mentoring for early career scientists to support their career development and quest for extramural research funding. This paper briefly describes two new programs of professional development for early career investigators, implemented or in the process of implementation at two research-intensive universities in the US. The target audience includes highly motivated senior graduate students, post doctoral scientists and early career faculty members pursuing interdisciplinary basic, clinical or translational science career tracks. The first program described herein has been implemented at two universities as an independent program. The second, substantively more extensive program is in the process of implementation, and includes all elements of the first program as a key component.