Career Enhancement Program

CAREER ENHANCEMENT PROGRAM – PROJECT SUMMARY The goal of the Career Enhancement Program (CEP) is to attract, develop, and monitor the most promising investigators for translational research in hepatobiliary cancer. To meet these objectives, the aims of the SPORE CEP are designed to:  identify the most promising candidates  emphasize the recruitment of qualified women, minorities, and persons with disabilities  conduct a thorough evaluation of all applicants  evaluate and monitor career development and mentoring of CEP awardees  facilitate extramural funding and integration of awardees into future SPORE projects The CEP is targeted to both junior faculty and early mid-career faculty at any Mayo Clinic campus who will commit to mentored career development in translational, multidisciplinary basic, clinical or population-based hepatobiliary cancer research. Mentoring teams consist of both senior hepatobiliary cancer researchers at Mayo Clinic together with highly productive investigators in other areas of cancer research. Mentoring is accompanied by close oversight by the SPORE leadership. The Director of the CEP will report to the SPORE Director and the SPORE Internal Advisory Board. Mayo Clinic has, by its seamless blend of patient care and basic and applied research facilities, an environment conducive to this type of mentored translational research. In that Mayo is highly competitive in recruiting faculty, there is a continuous pool of early, but outstanding, scientists and clinicians (including talented female and minority investigators) who would benefit by our SPORE’s proposed CEP to engage in translational research with a focus on hepatobiliary cancer. We have developed a formal mechanism for recruiting, selecting, and evaluating awardees, and will ensure that awardees are integrated into the SPORE research environment. The explicit expectation is that the awardees will utilize the resources made available to them for the development of independent research programs and acquisition of independent funding in hepatobiliary cancer research. One annual award for up to $100,000 will be made ($50K from the SPORE grant, matched by Mayo Clinic Cancer Center support).