The Addiction Research Training Program at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) was recently awarded $2.1 million from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) to renew the program another five years.
The award marks the second time the program has been renewed by NIDA, part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), since it began at UAMS in 2009. The program has received a total of $6 million in NIH funding. The award provides stipends as well as tuition and training-related and travel expenses for eight to 12 trainees in the area of addiction research.
The NIDA addiction research training program is one of only two NIH T32 awards in Arkansas, the other one housed within the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology in the UAMS College of Medicine. NIDA funds 55 similar T32 training programs across the country.
“The T32 is a wonderful career development tool designed to create well-trained scientists who are increasingly placed in leading academic faculty positions,” said Clint Kilts, PhD, director of the program since 2012, and a professor in the College of Medicine Department of Psychiatry.
Kilts pointed to the 14 former program trainees who have gone on to become faculty members, including six at UAMS, as an example of the T32’s impact in creating the next generation of leaders in addiction science and medicine.
“It’s the unique trainee outcomes that matters in the end,” said Kilts, also director of UAMS’ Brain Imaging Research Center. “The participants are very team oriented and that will help them build significant collaborative teams in the future capable of providing prevention and treatment solutions for the immense public health problem posed by addiction.”