Strategies to Retain Trainees and Hybrid Fields: NIH Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research T32 Training Program

This session will highlight two key areas of concern for the future of biomedical and behavioral/social sciences research: (1) the dramatic transformation in data types and sources along with changes in how research is conducted; and (2) an apparent mismatch between many existing training programs and career prospects. One approach for addressing these challenges, a new pilot training program recently funded by the NIH Office of Behavioral and Social Science Research (OBSSR), will be described. 

A group of trans-NIH staff led by Elizabeth Ginexi at OBSSR developed and released a request for applications (RFA) for the Predoctoral Training in Advanced Data Analytics for Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (TADA-BSSR) - Institutional Research Training Program [T32]. The pilot program aims to facilitate data science training commensurate with the diverse data sources now available for behavioral and social sciences research and to help address the need for students in the next generation of programs to have better preparation to communicate across disciplines and with a wider range of sciences. The vision of the TADA-BSSR T32 initiative is to develop a cohort of specialized predoctoral candidates who possess advanced competencies in data science analytics to apply to an increasingly complex landscape of behavioral and social health-related big data. These predoctoral training programs were encouraged to integrate computer science, informatics, mathematics, and statistics into behavioral and social sciences research training.