Lee Harrison, MD, and Nicolas Sluis-Cremer, PhD, have been awarded funding in the amount of $988,818 for a five-year T32 training grant by the National Institutes of Health/National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIH/NIAID) entitled “University of Pittsburgh Training Program in Antimicrobial Resistance”. This proposal was submitted in response to the competitive funding opportunity entitled Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award (NRSA) Institutional Research Training Grant (Parent T32) under funding opportunity number PA-18-403.
Antimicrobial resistance is one of the most pressing public health issues facing the world today. However, a paucity of local and national training opportunities dedicated to this field creates a critical gap that may impact our current and future ability to tackle antimicrobial resistance. We are establishing the University of Pittsburgh Training Program in Antimicrobial Resistance (Pitt TPAR), which will train both graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in advanced studies of antimicrobial resistance. The overall objective of the Pitt TPAR is to provide a collaborative, interdisciplinary, and coordinated team-mentoring effort to trainees from diverse academic backgrounds to foster highly-skilled, independent investigators who have the technical, intellectual and leadership skills that will allow them to make major contributions to the antimicrobial resistance field. The Pitt TPAR is unique in that it will leverage concepts in drug resistance from diverse bacterial, fungal and viral systems, with the goal of educating trainees in fundamental concepts of resistance, and enable the utilization of common themes for their research.