Geroscience Education and Training 2 (GET2) Network Collaborative
Funded Grant
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Aging is the main risk factor for conditions that jointly account for most morbidity, mortality, and health care costs. Many gerotherapeutics targeting biological aging are in early-stage clinical trials. The discovery, validation, and implementation into clinical care of such transformational therapies will require the creation of a robust training pipeline to build a sustainable geroscience workforce. Having recognized this bottleneck to the advancement of geroscience early on, our team began to develop foundational curricular materials in geroscience targeting medical students, PhD students, and geriatric fellows, while also creating a Certificate in Geroscience Research Program (CGRP) to train next generation of geroscience researchers at three of the MPIs’ institutions (R25AG073119; Kuchel contact MPI; 9/2021-6/2024). During this earlier Geroscience Education and Training (GET) Network endeavor, we identified challenges to the dissemination and adoption of educational materials in geroscience. PAR-23-315 now offers a timely opportunity for us to build upon these achievements and lessons learned by broadening the scope, impact, rigor and longer-term sustainability of our efforts in geroscience education. This will be achieved through a partnership with the Gerontological Society of America (GSA; prime awardee; D’Antonio contact MPI) through the creation of the Geroscience Education and Training 2 (GET2) Network . Goals of this new GET2 award will be achieved through the following Aims: Enhance access to the CGRP via a centralized virtual-hybrid option based at GSA. Increase the Geroscience workforce in terms of institutions engaged and research and clinical disciplines engaged. This will be accomplished in part through the creation of an innovative GET2 Geroscience Ambassadors Program. Systematically evaluate the quality, adoption and impact of all our geroscience curricula with the assistance of educational experts. We envision GET2 as an innovative academic-professional society partnership which will strengthen and broaden the impact of our efforts in geroscience education. As importantly, we also believe that the involvement of GSA, together with potential future pr ivate sector partners (see Letter of Support from the Academy for Health Lifespan Research) will help facilitate the longer-term sustainability of this important work beyond the end date of a potential NIA award.
