Aging and Health
The Johns Hopkins Center on Aging and Health

Research Career Development Core
Overview
Past and Current Projects
Available Resources
Key Personnel

Key Functions

The Research Career Development Core (RCDC) contributes to the JHU Older Americans Independence Center's (OAIC) overall goals as follows:

1.   Development of future research leaders in frailty research. RCDC attracts, selects and provides to outstanding junior faculty the protected time and the career development, mentoring and didactic skills essential to their growth into independent investigators.  These skills enable them to:

a. Understand and translate advances in basic science research on frailty and integrate them with clinical needs to provide unique insights and understandings of strategies to prevent or treat frailty to preserve independence of older Americans.

b. Develop, design, test and evaluate clinical research interventions to prevent and treat frailty associated with aging and its complications.

c. Develop abilities essential for academic career advancement, including written and oral communication, grant development, time management, explicit goal setting and collaboration.

d. Successfully bridge the critical period between fellowship and independent funding for investigator-initiated research and become independent investigators in frailty research and translation.

2.   Infrastructure: Provides the environment, structure, intellectual input and guidance, and critical mass of investigators needed to ensure successful basic and clinical multidisciplinary research collaboration among the supported faculty so as to accelerate the development and translation of breakthroughs in the prevention and treatment of frailty. This includes the leadership of a clinical translation unit, in collaboration with other RCDC cores, which focuses on investigator training and mentorship in clinical research. This unit incorporates contributions from all cores in order to provide an effective, multidisciplinary resource to investigators.

3.   Diversity: Continues to achieve full and equitable representation and inclusion of women and minorities among OAIC RCDC faculty.

4.   Leadership: Works with the Leadership/Administrative Core to establish scientific goals and coordinate activities with other cores and core leaders to evaluate the program and to appropriately revise the goals and processes, as needed, to optimize the careers of academic junior faculty in the field of frailty research.

5.   Productivity: Establishes and monitors productivity and accountability benchmarks and supports RCDC faculty in achieving them.

6.   Monitoring: Provides coordination, oversight, and reporting of all RCDC-supported activities.

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In the News

OAIC-supported investigator, Peter Abadir, led the effort to identify a novel and fully functional mitochondrial angiotensin system that declines with age (PNAS; Press Release)

Johns Hopkins and  University of Maryland held a Joint Pepper Centers Biostatistics Symposium on Time To Event Analysis on September 9, 2011 (Joint Pepper Centers Symposium)

OAIC-supported investigators, Ronald Cohn and Tyesha Burks, discover losartan protects against loss of old or damaged muscle (Science Translational Medicine; Press Release)

OAIC-supported investigator Ravi Varadhan named 2011 Brookdale Leadership in Aging Fellowship Awardee (Brookdale Foundation)

Research by Frank Lin  (RCDC) and colleagues find hearing loss is prevalent in nearly two thirds of adults aged 70 years and older in the U.S. population. (Journals of Gerontology)

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Announcements

Please click here to learn about our Pepper Scholars Program, a monthly collaborative initiative for supported investigators and all interested in ongoing aging research at the Johns Hopkins OAIC.

Please click here for more information about the Frailty Assessment Tool.

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