By Laura Gasque
The University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Nursing has received a highly competitive five-year, $1.8 million T32 training grant from the National Institute of Nursing Research/National Institutes of Health for the training program, Improving HEalth Across the Lifespan (iHEAL).
The goal is to prepare the next generation of the nurse scientist workforce to address a wide variety of health challenges through lenses of health disparities, social determinants of health, population and community health, prevention and health promotion, and systems and models of care.
“This is one of the few nurse scientist training programs in the South addressing comprehensive healthy living from a life-course lens,” said University Professor and T32 program co-director Marie Bakitas, DNSc, RN, AOCN, FPCN, FAAN. “Nursing science taps into the special relationship among nurses, patients and families to better understand them and their communities, and the many factors that influence their health. Patient and families interact with nurses more than any other clinicians. Because of this, nurses have a unique understanding of what improving health and well-being means across multiple settings, contexts and over a person’s entire lifespan. This holistic perspective means the discoveries made by nurse scientists have the potential to substantially improve individual and population health. This grant isn’t just significant for our School, but also for the people of our state, region and nation.”
This new training program will recruit two to three pre- and two to three post-doctoral nurse scientists yearly, providing them with tuition and stipend support and training through mentoring, experiential learning opportunities, and coursework in multidisciplinary health research, research ethics, professional development and leadership skills.
To learn more about the training program and to apply, click here.
“We will equip trainees with the knowledge to promote health and well-being by addressing health and health care needs at multiple levels—individual, family, community, and societal—and the skills to develop treatment and prevention strategies that are responsive to the reality of people's lives. These new nurse scientists will develop, in concert with their mentors, impactful research that will be far-reaching—across the region and the nation—wherever populations are exposed to the challenges of rural location, poverty, or other sources of disadvantage that threaten the opportunities for healthy living,” said Associate Professor, Coordinator of the Post-Doctoral Fellowship Program, and T32 co-director Frank Puga, PhD. “The T32 also will allow us to grow our Post-Doctoral Fellowship Program at the School significantly, creating new opportunities for nurse scientists.”
The program will leverage UAB’s existing training programs for additional growth, learning and interprofessional collaboration opportunities, especially with colleagues in the Comprehensive Healthy Living Research Center, Social Determinants of Health Institutional Core, and other relevant centers. Trainees will write a grant proposal, design and conduct their own research study and disseminate their work in peer-reviewed publications and presentations at scientific conferences.
“This T32 is a tremendous resource for our PhD students. Our goal, in addition to improving health in Alabama, the region, nation and world, is to expand the number of future nurse scientists who are equipped to tackle diverse and complex health issues at an individual and population level,” said Professor, Interim Director of the PhD Program, and T32 program co-director Pariya Wheeler, PhD. “We know the future of health and health care requires personalized approaches to prevention and treatment, and more nurse scientists in the workforce is key to developing interventions to maximize health and well-being for everyone.”
This T32 training grant is supported by the National Institute of Nursing Research of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number T32NR021681. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.