Graduate Training Programs in Clinical Investigation
The Graduate Training Programs in Clinical Investigation (GTPCI) are the first of their kind. A joint venture between the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (BSPH) and the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine (SOM), GTPCI trains clinicians to be more effective clinical scientists. Students gain the skills necessary to design and conduct clinical investigations of emerging medical treatments and technologies and to apply new diagnostic techniques and approaches to the study of human pathophysiology. We train mostly faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and other allied health professionals working with human subjects in clinical investigation. Our graduates pursue careers in academia and as independent clinical investigators at pharmaceutical firms and federal regulatory agencies.
In 1989, a Task Force on Clinical Research in the Department of Medicine reported results of a survey in which one-third of our clinical post-doctoral fellows indicated their desire to pursue “full-time clinical research” as a career objective. In the same survey, a large majority of post-doctoral fellows felt they were inadequately trained in clinical trial design (70%), data management (70%), the ethics of human experimentation (69%), and biostatistics (83%). At that time, almost half of the responding post-doctoral fellows expressed an interest in a structured training program in clinical investigation. Discussions on ways to meet this need ensued at the department and SOM levels and eventually enlarged to include the BSPH. At the same time, concerns about the adverse trends for clinical investigation and about the inadequate supply of qualified clinical investigators were being expressed at the national level. Johns Hopkins’ response to these local and national needs was the creation of GTPCI in 1992 and admitted its first students in 1993.