The Yale Pepper Center is soliciting letters of intent from full-time faculty members at Yale with interests and expertise relevant to aging research who would be interested in submitting a career development proposal (if currently within 4 years of first faculty appointment), a pilot project proposal, or a research development project. The scope of work to be supported by the Yale Pepper Center encompasses basic, translational, epidemiological, clinical trial, health services, informatics, and gerontologic biostatistics research. See instructions on the website for details regarding eligibility and types of awards.
**Important: The National Institute on Aging requires each Pepper Center to declare a theme and the proposed research must fit within that theme. Our theme is described below. In your letter of intent, you will need to clearly indicate how your proposed research fits within this theme.
Yale Pepper Center theme: The unifying theme of the Yale Pepper Center is the investigation of multifactorial geriatric health conditions. This theme encompasses (1) single health conditions with multiple contributing factors or with multiple relevant outcome domains and (2) multiple conditions occurring simultaneously. A defining criterion for Yale Pepper Center support is that, regardless of the condition or type of research, the work acknowledges, and accounts for, the multiple factors determining health in older adults. The conceptual underpinning of this theme is that both single conditions and multiple coexisting conditions are determined by the co-occurrence of multiple predisposing and precipitating factors; these conditions and factors, in turn, affect the individual in a range of health outcomes. The predisposing factors may be at the genetic, molecular, physiologic, impairment, disease, or socio-demographic levels, while the precipitating factors may include behavioral, environmental, social, medical, psychological, and/or other triggers. The Yale theme requires designs and models (e.g. molecular, animal, and statistical) that inform the study of multiple, simultaneously interactive factors and outcomes. It is not sufficient to state that the condition you are studying is multifactorial. Rather, you need to be explicit in describing how your approach is multifactorial. As a related subtheme, the Yale Pepper Center also aims to advance the science of clinical decision making in the face of trade-offs and multiple competing outcomes. This includes developing strategies to elicit older persons’ health outcome priorities.
Timeline: A two-page letter of intent is due by October 15, 2018. Successful candidates will be contacted by November 18 with details for submitting a full proposal.
Application materials, including a complete set of instructions, may be obtained from the Pepper Center website: https://medicine.yale.edu/intmed/geriatrics/peppercenter/ or Ms. Eliza Kiwak at eliza.kiwak@yale.edu or Robbin Bonanno at robbin.bonanno@yale.edu.