Career Enhancement Core
The Center for Social Capital (SoCa) Career Enhancement Core (CEC) will aid in the collective mission to build long-term capacity that fosters cancer risk reduction and control within New York’s persistent poverty areas.
To fulfill this mission, the Co-Directors have developed the SoCa Method, defined as:
The development of a sustainable infrastructure for a social network where the established norms of the network produce the expectation of entry, retention, and progression of investigators in cancer health disparities, advancing the individual and the collective goals of the community.
Our multipronged approach will support early-stage investigators entry, retention, and progression into conducting cancer health disparities research among the most impoverished populations. With unparalleled resources across six distinct New York institutes and health systems and the NYC Departments of Education and Health, the SoCa CEC leverages existing programs and is building needed programming, harmonizing collective efforts that activates and supports sustained movement of early-stage investigators across the biomedical enterprise with the expertise needed to serve underserved communities
Entry: The SoCa CEC is developing web-based programmatic infrastructure to activate established cancer research investigators to submit and obtain diversity supplements that support biomedical workforce entry of early-stage investigators who are dedicated to cancer health disparities in impoverished communities (from as early as high school through junior faculty support). Web-Based resources for diversity supplements will be forthcoming Fall 2023.
Retention: The SoCa CEC aims to retain early-stage investigators dedicated to serving underserved communities through the development and implementation of a Clinical Research Coordinator Training Program for undergraduates, post baccalaureates, and master’s students to facilitate entry into clinical coordinator positions within persistent poverty communities. The Training Program will be seeking applicants in 2024 with dates TBD.
Progression: The SoCa CEC will support the progress of early-stage investigators by the provision of a personalized approach to team-based mentoring and training to bolster pre-faculty investigators who are committed to cancer health disparities in impoverished communities to attain research funding, strengthening their position for academic promotion. The application and selection of SoCa Scholars will commence in 2024 with dates TBD.