Mentored Research
A central element of the PhD Program in Clinical and Translational Science at the University of Pittsburgh is participation in mentored research.
Students may work with faculty who are from the School of Medicine or any of the other five schools of the health sciences (the Graduate School of Public Health, the School of Dental Medicine, the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, the School of Nursing, and the School of Pharmacy) and who conduct clinical or translational research funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) or other federally funded institution. An optimal mentored research experience will be characterized by at least three features:
- The valued input of an experienced and responsive mentor.
- Involvement in an interesting research project that the student can take ownership of.
- The opportunity to work as part of a multidisciplinary team that provides exposure to all phases of research: conception, design, grant writing, recruitment and consent, data collection and analysis, and dissemination of results.
To maximize the mentor-student relationship, all PhD students will participate in a structured, interactive half-day workshop with their mentors. Throughout the student's research experience, the program co-directors will monitor the relationship to ensure that the learning needs of each student are met.
All PhD students will be expected to choose a primary and secondary mentor by the start of the first year of the program. The program co-directors will assess the compatibility of the students' proposed research with their selected mentors or will help students identify a mentor if one has not already been selected.
Below are some Web resources to help in the search for potential mentors at the University of Pittsburgh:
- To search for faculty by research interest, use the University of Pittsburgh Schools of the Health Sciences Faculty Research Interests Project.
- To confirm that a faculty member has federal funding, search by name in the NIH RePORTER database (formerly called the Computer Retrieval of Information on Scientific Projects).*
* The database, maintained by the Office of Extramural Research at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), includes projects funded by the NIH, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), and the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Health (OASH). Although investigators funded by the Department of Veterans Affairs or the Department of Defense also are eligible to be program mentors, these investigators are not searchable in the database.
