Abstract With a critical need to establish a workforce of specialists in neurodegenerative diseases focusing on Alzheimer’s disease, there is an increasing demand for multidisciplinary scientists in the biomedical research community. Despite this significant need, there are few training programs that provide experience in academic and clinical settings. This proposal for an Alzheimer’s Disease and Related-Dementia Drug Discovery training program is critical to meeting that increased demand. The overall goal of this program is to fund five predoctoral students from the Colleges of Pharmacy and Medicine to become experienced leaders in interdisciplinary research with the ability to collaborate effectively on cross-disciplinary teams with broad expertise to address challenges within target-based drug discovery. The program will help the selected students to develop keen scientific rigor and translational skills necessary to compete and excel in the future workplace, including but not limited to academic institutions, government agencies, for-profit businesses, and private foundations. Importantly, the program faculty are drawn from a wide array of disciplines with many active collaborations. Twelve mentors are dedicated to this training program, all either tenured or in tenure track positions, with the experience and funding to undertake their training and mentoring roles. These faculty will provide trainees with a unique program in which to learn techniques and methodologies of collaborative research projects. The proposed training program is composed of formal didactic courses, discussion-based journal clubs and seminars, shadowing of a clinician and mentored research leading to a doctoral thesis and Ph.D. degree within 5.5 years of entering graduate school. This innovative program will produce an outstanding output of trainees with high accomplishments that will in turn catalyze our recruitment of the best students for this interdisciplinary training program at the University of Nebraska Medical Center.

Project Narrative: This interdisciplinary training program is designed to train the next generation of scientists and clinicians to gain the knowledge and support necessary to tackle the complexities presented by Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) and Related Dementias (ADRD). The mission of this training program is to address the critical need to connect the current disparities between significant scientific advances in the science and treatment of AD and the implementation of drug design and discovery for human trials. Students who graduate this program will examine critical hypotheses regarding the etiology, pathophysiology, and effective drug therapies for those diagnosed with ADRD and other neurodegenerative disorder