NCI Awardee Skills Development Consortium (NASDC): a Successful Novel Educational Effort to Maintain Early Academic...

The pilot National Cancer Institute (NCI) Awardee Skills Development Consortium (NASDC) was designed and funded by the NCI in 2019 to support a group of multi-institutional educational projects to help early-career NCI grantees remain academically competitive. Retention and academic competitiveness of early-career awardees are critical for advancing cancer research; therefore, NASDC sought to develop the next generation of leaders to meet the nation's biomedical, behavioral, and clinical cancer research needs. NASDC comprised a group of institutions supported through cooperative agreement awards issued by the NCI, including a U24 coordinating center (U24CC) to support logistics and evaluations and four institutional awardees to deliver evidence-based scientific and educational content (UE5 awards for research education projects [UE5]). The U24CC managed applications, conducted course evaluations, and facilitated the consortium's administrative structure. The consortium infrastructure consisted of a Governance Steering Committee with five working groups to manage the projects. A web portal was developed to help recruit eligible applicants to attend the courses. Each course was delivered five to six times over 3 years, and an evaluation system was implemented to assess outcomes within courses and across courses and cohorts. Originally intended to be in-person short courses, the COVID pandemic forced the projects to adapt to virtual platforms. NASDC aimed to build a stable pool of leading cancer researchers. NASDC successfully supported junior faculty NCI grantees by delivering evidence-based educational content, despite the COVID-19 pandemic. The intent of the program was implemented smoothly, and courses were delivered effectively. Although NCI did not reissue the program in 2021 for budgetary reasons, some of these courses are now funded by an R25 mechanism. This is the first in a series of papers detailing this program's outcomes.