Accepting applications for 2023-2024 and 2024-2025 fellowship positions!

Program Funding: National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA: T32 AA007453)

Type of Program: NIH Postdoctoral Fellowship (MPH degree is an available option).
The duration of training is two years, dependent on progress.

Program Description: The Developmental Alcohol Research Training (DART) Program approaches training in alcohol use and addiction research from a developmental perspective, focusing on gestation to adulthood. The DART training faculty are highly experienced, multidisciplinary, and collaborative, and offer mentorship in areas of high priority to NIAAA such as the developmental stages of alcohol use and abuse, timing and consequences of alcohol use, racial and gender differences, and the effects of health inequities on the development of alcohol use and misuse. The training faculty have expertise in developmental, epidemiological, clinical, and neurobiological approaches, and advanced quantitative methods. A significant strength of the Program is access to an unusually large number of NIH-funded research projects that include large, longitudinal cohorts and allow analyses across multiple developmental phases. Supporting faculty who are not specifically alcohol researchers, but who have expertise in fields such as behavioral and community health, psychology, pediatrics, and statistics, allow trainees to develop their research with novel combinations of methods and expertise. Training involves active participation on research projects with mentors and design of new studies, supplemented by courses in Addictive Behaviors, Developmental Psychopathology, Epidemiology, and Advanced Quantitative Methods, and by the required Seminar on Addictions Research (SOAR) and the Career and Research Development Seminar (CARD). The DART program faculty are committed to training researchers to become independent investigators with the skills and tools for collaborative, multidisciplinary research in developmental studies of alcohol use and abuse in order to accomplish excellence and innovation in developmental alcohol research.

This is a well-established training program that was begun in 1982. Since that time, 85% of the postdoctoral fellows who have completed the program are in academic or research positions. Further, the trainees have exceptional success obtaining research funding compared to the national average. The trainees’ scholarly output addresses areas of central importance in alcohol research such as onset of alcohol use among children and ontogeny of risk factors for alcohol use disorder, long-term effects of prenatal alcohol exposure, health inequities with respect to heavy and problem alcohol consumption and associated precursors, consequences, and treatment, effectiveness of prevention/interventions for dually-diagnosed patients, psychopharmacological efficacy in the treatment of alcohol dependence, and the relation between alcohol abuse and the natural history of AIDS.