Participating institutions

Cardiovascular Surgery Unit from Guatemala (UNICAR, for its initials in Spanish)

Center of INCAP for the Prevention of Chronic Diseases (CIIPEC, for its initials in Spanish)

Funding agency

International Development Research Center (IDRC).

General objective

General

To strengthen, through mentored research awards for graduate and postgraduate students, research capacity in Central America needed to generate policy relevant evidence leading to NCDs prevention and control.

Specific

To conduct NCDs determinants research to strengthen systemic research capacity and to support NCDs control strategies based on the WHO global monitoring framework.

To strengthen local and regional capacity to conduct research training and implementation by funding graduate and postgraduate research design, implementation, and dissemination.

To strengthen research capacity at the individual level by providing research funds, training and mentoring for their research work to graduate and postgraduate students.

To strengthen research capacity at the organizational level by building a mentoring culture with onsite faculty as they oversee students´ research work and provide career advice.

To provide cross-country and multi-disciplinary joint mentorship through a research network in NCDs research.

Methodology

The training program proposed will have two interconnected components, one targeting recent graduate students and one targeting postgraduate students enrolled in a master´s degree

The fellowship program

The program will seek to recruit through a competitive process, recent medical, nutritional sciences and medical anthropology graduates who are interested in pursuing a one-year research fellowship. The fellows will acquire hands-on experience in conducting research. Activities will include protocol writing, developing and adapting questionnaires, interviewing, data entry and analysis, and research-to-action, including publishing and presenting results to different target audiences in appropriate formats.

The regional postgraduate scholarship program

This program will focus on directly providing the tools and skills to postgraduate trainees with academic and health institutions in order to strengthen NCDs research capacity a the local and regional level. Health professionals and other professionals enrolled in a Master in Public Health (MPH) program and interested in NCDs from Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, Costa Rica or Panama will be recruited through annual request for proposals. The program will rely on a local on site-mentor and a CIIPEC mentor. The local mentor will be affiliated with the university where the students are enrolled and assigned in agreement with the University´s MPH director. The trainee will carry out the following activities: protocol writing, recruiting research assistants, developing and adapting questionnaires, interviewing, data entry and analysis, and knowledge-translation, including publishing and presenting research results to different target audiences in appropriate formats. Each project will contain its own knowledge-translation/dissemination strategy. In addition to the work from their thesis, trainees will have access to all the training activities organized by CIIPEC.