News

NIMH R25 Supplement Enhances Resources for Research Training
as Part of National Neuroscience Curriculum Initiative

The National Institute of Mental Health has awarded an administrative supplement to support promoting research training during psychiatry residency as part of the National Neuroscience Curriculum Initiative (NNCI).

Michael Travis, MD, Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and Director of the Office of Residency Training at Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic of UPMC, serves as a co-chair of the NNCI in partnership with his colleagues Drs. David Ross of Yale and Melissa Arbuckle of Columbia University. The supplement is an addition to an existing R25 grant awarded to Jane Eisen, MD of Brown University, who serves as the Chair of the NNCI Advisory Board. The aim of the NNCI is to create an educational framework, based on adult learning theory and educational best practices, to make the latest cutting edge findings from Clinical Neuroscience available to all learners in a way that is understandable and will inform patient centered care.

The basic structure of the NNCI framework is based upon DSM categorical diagnoses. However, each diagnostic module will also be linked to relevant domains within the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC). It is anticipated that each domain may appear in several different categorical diagnoses. This will aid both integration and repeated learning. The Curriculum Design will include modules on Foundational Neuroscience in Psychiatry, Biopsychosocial Formulation, an Integrative Case Conference/Translational Neuroscience format, and Neuroscience in the Media, among others. Materials from the NNCI will be opening accessible and will focus on both the process of teaching neuroscience effectively and teaching content. Content will be drawn from existing sources as well as material newly developed for the NNCI curriculum design.

When fully implemented, the NNCI will provide a cohesive and inclusive forum for the sharing and disseminating teaching methods and materials developed by clinician educators for clinician educators informed by the wider neuroscience community. An important goal of this initiative is to reduce the time between scientific discovery and the implementation and development of psychiatry as a clinical neuroscience discipline within medicine where every practitioner is thinking about neuropathophysiology during every patient encounter.