Frontiers in Emerging, Reemerging and Zoonotic Diseases and Diversity (FrERZD2) - PROJECT SUMMARY
Our nation is nearly paralyzed by the twin pandemics of COVID-19 and painful inequities in health outcomes
among COVID-19 infected Americans of differing ethnicities. To help address these, we seek sponsorship to
train the next generation of pandemic and emerging disease researchers in the FRONTIERS IN EMERGING,
RE-EMERGING AND ZOONOTIC DISEASES AND DIVERSITY. FrERZD2 will launch and sustain three vital
undertakings: sophisticated courses for skills development; relevant vital research experiences; and career
mentoring activities. Responsive to PAR-20-289, it is designed for 16 trainees who are graduate and medical
students, medical residents, postdoctoral fellows, and/or early-career faculty, and who also are US citizens or
permanent residents. The week-long course will help to ensure that clinically active scientists (especially
physicians) are able to obtain permission to participate. Too few laboratories are led by under-represented
minority (URM) scientists, and not enough new URM trainees graduate. We seek 5 years of sponsorship to
offer FrERZD2 courses at Morehouse School of Medicine (MSM), an HBCU, in 2021, 2023, and 2025 and
Ponce Health Sciences University (PHSU), a Hispanic-Serving Institution, in 2022 and 2024. Under the
overall directorship of Gerald Schatten from Pittsburgh, along with Jonathan Stiles at MSM, Idhaliz Flores from
PHSU, and Calvin Simerly, also from Pittsburgh, FrERZD2 is overseen by an external scientific advisory
committee. It offers dynamic advanced training courses consisting of daily lectures on emerging concepts,
followed by extended discussion, laboratory research, technologically intense workshops, and informal
seminars. Our similar training programs have recruited participants of whom 34% self-identify as African
American/Black and 30% as Hispanic Americans; 66% are women, and 62% are from URM institutions. Six
specific aims are proposed. Aim 1. Provide conceptual education and experimental training. Aim 2. Provide
background information and self-reflective exercises and demonstrations to understand, appreciate, and
address the historic and current underpinnings of inequities in the research workforce’s diversity and disparities
in health care. Aim 3. Sponsor meaningful mentored research. Aim 4. Discuss career planning. Aim 5.
Educate participants on the responsible conduct of research. Aim 6. Provide unbiased, quantitative,
independent mechanisms to track trainees’ careers, comprehensively and longitudinally. The program’s name,
FRONTIERS IN EMERGING, RE-EMERGING AND ZOONOTIC DISEASES AND DIVERSITY, acknowledges
our hope that the COVID pandemic may soon recede significantly and our realization that other emerging,
reemerging, and zoonotic diseases will arise that must be timely addressed. Overall, in conducting this
program, we will continue to enhance and expand the research careers of the most promising scientists, with
sensitivity to ensuring full diversity in the NIAID workforce.
