UAMS Addiction Training Program Awarded $2.1 Million
| LITTLE ROCK — 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, Ph.D., 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.”
The UAMS NIDA T32 training program is unique in that it relies on a connected network of 25 faculty members from six departments at UAMS — Psychiatry, Pharmacology and Toxicology, Pharmacy Evaluation and Practice, Pharmaceutical Science, Neurobiology and Developmental Neuroscience, and Health Behavior and Health Education, to mentor the young research scientists. The UAMS program is further unique in its simultaneous, multi-level training of predoctoral students, postdoctoral fellows, medical students and psychiatry residents.
UAMS is the state’s only health sciences university, with colleges of Medicine, Nursing, Pharmacy, Health Professions and Public Health; a graduate school; a hospital; a main campus in Little Rock; a Northwest Arkansas regional campus in Fayetteville; a statewide network of regional campuses; and eight institutes: the Winthrop P. Rockefeller Cancer Institute, Jackson T. Stephens Spine & Neurosciences Institute, Harvey & Bernice Jones Eye Institute, Psychiatric Research Institute, Donald W. Reynolds Institute on Aging, Translational Research Institute, Institute for Digital Health & Innovation and the Institute for Community Health Innovation. UAMS includes UAMS Health, a statewide health system that encompasses all of UAMS’ clinical enterprise. UAMS is the only adult Level 1 trauma center in the state. UAMS has 3,275 students, 890 medical residents and fellows, and five dental residents. It is the state’s largest public employer with more than 12,000 employees, including 1,200 physicians who provide care to patients at UAMS, its regional campuses, Arkansas Children’s, the VA Medical Center and Baptist Health. Visit www.uams.edu or uamshealth.com. Find us on Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), YouTube or Instagram.
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