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20% of NIH funds are available for new projects each year, even a small drop inhibits funding for new grant applications, which stifles innovation. Education Education was another point of emphasis in both plenary and breakout sessions. Within undergraduate medical education, there is an increasing emphasis on fostering curiosity, standardizing learning outcomes, individualizing the learning process, promoting multiple forms of integration, and fostering development of a future physician’s professional identity. Institutions have many content experts, but few true educators, so there is a need to educate the educators. In a workshop on revitalizing and invigorating PhD education, there was discussion of how and why academic medical centers are transforming education in order to prepare trainees for successful employment. The job market for PhD researchers is fairly stable and can absorb the current rate of trainees with an unemployment rate of ~2%, with 1520% of PhDs accepting academic faculty positions. Given these data, there does not appear to be a broad effort to reduce the number of PhD trainees. However, there should be an effort to continue to expand the professional skill set for trainees to meet the diverse demands of today’s biomedical workforce, which is reflected in Keith Yamamoto’s
The Pharmacologist • June 2019
PhD “hub” with career option “spokes” model (https:// www.ibiology.org/biomedical-workforce/graduateeducation). Unanswered questions include: 1) How do we modernize graduate student curricula to include diversity in the PhD workforce? Do some course components and/or research experiences get eliminated to make room for this new material, and if so, which ones? 2) How can we incorporate multidisciplinary training in PhD education? 3) Is there adequate mentoring of PhD students in non-academic vocations, and if not, who assumes this role? CFAS appears to be responding to prior feedback from basic scientists as evidenced by conference programming with either broad interest to both clinical and basic scientists or to basic scientists in particular. We should, therefore, continue to engage with CFAS to ensure our voice and concerns as pharmacologists are heard by the AAMC and the general public. As your representatives to CFAS, we are keen to advocate for the concerns of ASPET members at CFAS meetings. As your representatives to CFAS, we are keen to advocate for the concerns of ASPET members at CFAS meetings. Please email either Joe Blumer (blumerjb@musc.edu) or John Szarek ( jszarek@som. geisinger.edu) with issues you would like us to raise at the next CFAS meeting. Visit the CFAS website for more information and resources: https://www.aamc. org/members/cfas.