Trainee Symposium for IDeA state trainees - The goal of this conference proposal is to broaden the scientific maturation and career opportunities for Institutional Development Award (IDeA) State cancer research trainees, including graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, by establishing an annual cancer research conference. IDeA States have historically been less successful at competing for federal funding. We therefore expect that IDeA State trainees have overall fewer opportunities for exposure to a broad variety of research projects and investigators, and that trainees from these states have potential to benefit from exposure to an inter-disciplinary group of faculty and trainees. Our proposal directly addresses the stated NCI goal to enhance the participation of junior scientists, trainees, and investigators from communities such as found in rural areas, traditionally underrepresented within the cancer research field. To our knowledge there is not currently a nation-wide gathering of IDeA State cancer research trainees. A barrier to such a conference is the lack of resources available to some trainees. To address this barrier the West Virginia University Cancer Institute will host an annual 2.5 day conference and will identify federal and non-federal sources of support to fully fund all meeting attendees. A highly qualified Organizing Committee composed of well-established scientists who work in IDeA states across the continental and noncontinental United States and territories will develop the meeting agenda, present research talks at the conference, interact with trainees during built-in flexible time, and develop post-meeting refinements based on attendee feedback. For the initial meeting the plenary speaker and faculty presenters will broadly address the theme of “mechanisms of cancer health disparity”. Several of our Organizing Committee members have specific expertise in this area. This theme addresses the stated NCI goal to consider and incorporate cancer health disparity-related topics or sessions into meeting programs. To encourage participation, trainee presentations and posters will be broadly focused on any cancer or cancer-relevant project. Avenues for dissemination of registration information to IDeA State trainees will include the IDeA Networks of Biomedical Research Excellence (INBRE), the National Association of IDeA Principal Investigators (NAIPI) and the Centers of Biomedical Research Excellence (CoBRE) principal investigators. To achieve these goals we propose to recruit a pool of conference attendees from across the United States through transparency, effective dissemination and the involvement of select, highly qualified faculty from other IDeA states with broad expertise in cancer cell biology and basic mechanisms of cancer health disparity (Specific Aim 1). By iterative improvement based on post-meeting attendee feedback we propose to develop an open, flexible meeting format that enhances learning while supporting scientific interactions and maturation, with optional breakout activities (Specific Aim 2). The long-term impact of this IDeA State Trainee Conference will be to enhance the scientific maturation and networking and career opportunities for attendees.
