# The Child Health Research Career Development Program at UCSF

> **NIH NIH K12** · UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN FRANCISCO · 2021 · $444,960

## Abstract

Project Summary/Abstract
This application is submitted in response to RFA-HD-18-011, Child Health Research Career
Development Award (CHRCDA) Program to provide K12 awards through the CHRCDA mechanism
to young pediatric investigators. This new application requests resources to support three
pediatricians each year who hold MD or MD/PhD degrees and have completed scholarship training
in a clinical subspecialty. The rationale for the program is based on the well-documented and urgent
need to support mentored career development for pediatricians to enable them to become fully
independent and productive basic science researchers, and the fact that the department of
Pediatrics at UCSF has the vision, experience and infrastructure to train the next generation of
leaders in pediatric science. Our aims are to (1) offer a structured program for training academic
pediatricians, (2) foster career development and promote retention of junior faculty, (3) expose
promising early career pediatricians to the intellectual richness of UCSF research and (4) promote
diversity in academic pediatrics. The scholars trained by this program will bring state-of-the-art
approaches to bear on diagnosis, treatment and prevention of health problems in children as well as
childhood onset of adult illness. The design of this program involves harnessing the expertise of world-
class basic laboratory scientists who will serve as mentors for interdisciplinary training. The basic
science training program is focused around eight scientific cores: cancer, cardiopulmonary medicine,
developmental biology, genetics, immunology, neurobiology, stem cell biology, and our new
computational sciences core. Each core has a Director, designated faculty, and a specific didactic
curriculum. The scholars, in conjunction with their mentor and Core Director, will also participate in
a program of additional discipline-specific course work dependent on both the prior experience and
training of the applicant and the scientific theme of the trainee’s research, which may often overlap
amongst different cores. In this application, we provide evidence that the Department of Pediatrics
together with the broader UCSF research community comprise an exceptional environment for
preparing young pediatricians who will receive support through the CHRCDA mechanism for
successful careers as basic science researchers. There are > 1,200 research laboratories and >
2,200 active research projects at UCSF, and the faculty includes 5 Nobel laureates, 64 members
of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 76 members of the Institute of Medicine, and 18
Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigators. This program is an investment in the future of
children's health, as the diverse group of researchers we will train will harness advanced research
strategies to address urgent problems that will result in new treatments to improve child health.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10224603
- **Project number:** 1K12HD105250-01
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN FRANCISCO
- **Principal Investigator:** Raphael Hirsch
- **Activity code:** K12 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2021
- **Award amount:** $444,960
- **Award type:** 1
- **Project period:** 2021-04-01 → 2026-03-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10224603

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10224603, The Child Health Research Career Development Program at UCSF (1K12HD105250-01). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-24 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10224603. Licensed CC0.

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