International Traineeships in AIDS Prevention Studies: 25 Years of Collaborative Research

Abstract

The International Traineeships in AIDS Prevention Studies (ITAPS) program is commemorating its 25th year as the joint UCSF Global Health Sciences’ and Center for AIDS Prevention Studies’ premier training program for researchers from resource-limited settings. Since 1988, we have trained 248 early- and mid-career scientists from 46 countries, who have gone on to publish more than 1800 manuscripts in the peer-reviewed literature and present their research at national, regional, and international conferences. Each year, we select a new group of promising scientists from low- and middle-income countries (LMIC) to collaborate with UCSF faculty on AIDS prevention and care research projects. Our program has historically offered three training tracks. In our research methods/protocol development track, incoming scholars develop new pilot research projects, either through an intensive summer workshop at UCSF or a blended-learning course involving face-to-face short courses combined with distance learning. Subsequently, these trainees field their projects in their home countries with continued technical assistance from UCSF. The second track is a scientific manuscript writing course for scholars who have already completed data collection, either as part of the ITAPS research methods track or through other means or partnerships. We provide guidance and mentoring as scholars conduct data analysis and prepare the results of their studies for publication. We also offer a grant writing track for select ITAPS alumni who are preparing to write NIH grant applications. Mentoring is the cornerstone of the ITAPS educational approach. Each incoming scholar works closely with a UCSF faculty mentor throughout the didactic portions of the program as well as during data collection and analysis, manuscript writing and publishing. Many scholars work with more than one mentor—e.g., a primary mentor with topical expertise and a secondary mentor with methodological expertise. These mentoring relationships often last for years as the scholars and UCSF faculty continue to work together designing new studies or publishing additional papers. We are currently designing a mentor training program for our most accomplished HIV prevention scientists from LMIC to prepare them to effectively support the professional goals of early-career investigators in their home countries and regions. These mentoring skills are often lacking among faculty in many academic institutions, and the absence of a mentoring culture is particularly pronounced in some of the LMIC in which we work. ITAPS has by most metrics been a great success. Because the cost of international travel has increased dramatically in recent years, one could argue that it is now too expensive to bring scientists from LMIC for short-term study at UCSF. It is our experience, however, that providing these scientists with protected time away from competing professional responsibilities at home is the only way to guarantee that they will be able to focus on designing a research project or completing a scientific manuscript. Recently there has been intense interest in asynchronous training, made possible through evolving digital pedagogies, with hope that it can provide the same result as individual mentoring but without the expense. We have begun to experiment with these technologies, and our experience has been that there is simply no substitute for the personal touch that only individual mentoring can bring. We believe that without this style of mentoring, the long-term capacity building that is the main goal of our program will not happen. By the time the trainees complete their experience as ITAPS scholars, they will have designed pilot research protocols for which they are the principal investigators and they will have vetted their study through multiple institutional review boards (IRBs), usually including the UCSF IRB, a local IRB, and the IRB of the funding institution. Each trainee will have fielded his/her study with ongoing technical assistance from an ITAPS faculty mentor. Each will have conducted preliminary data analysis on his/her own then completed it under the guidance of a mentor. Most will have published their results in peer-reviewed journals, often using English rather than their native language(s). Most will have presented their results at national and international AIDS conferences or through other less formal means of dissemination, to stakeholders and colleagues. And importantly, many will go on to conduct subsequent studies with funding from their own governments or as principal investigator or co-investigator of an NIH grant. In this special issue of AIDS & Behavior, we present 16 papers first authored by our ITAPS alumni. These scientists represent the regions from which we have drawn promising early-career investigators into our program since 1988. Four are from sub-Saharan Africa; four are from East, Southeast, and Central Asia; three are from Central and South America; and one is from Eastern Europe. While most of these scientists are recent ITAPS alumni, two of them participated in ITAPS as far back as 1989 and 1997.