NRSA Primary Care Research Fellowship
Director: Katrina Donahue, MD, MPH
Fellowship Overview
The fellowship‘s goal is to train primary care physicians and researchers for academic careers that emphasize primary care research. The two-to three-year fellowship provides participants with the knowledge, skills, and experience to pursue an individual research program. Fellows establish a research foundation through course work in the various departments of UNC’s Gillings School of Global Public Health and seminars in the School of Medicine’s North Carolina Translational and Clinical Sciences (NC TraCS) Institute, and reinforced through fellows’ research projects, works-in-progress seminars, and mentoring by clinical and research faculty.
Fellows enter the program directly from residency training, community practice, faculty positions, or PhD programs. Over the program’s 35 years, it has graduated over 75 fellows. Graduates have gone on to establish excellent publication records and achieve success in obtaining research funding, including career development awards. The vast majority currently hold academic positions.
During the fellowship, participants complete four to seven research projects, working closely with a variety of faculty from across UNC’s health sciences schools and other schools on campus. Mentoring plays a key role in fellows’ development.
Fellows’ research generally falls within one or more of the following areas of research excellence and opportunity on campus:
Health Disparities and Social Determinants of Health
Community Interventions
Health Workforce and Rural Health, Access to Care
Health Care Delivery Systems & Quality Improvement
Diet, Obesity, and Cardiovascular Disease Risks
Screening, Prevention, and Shared Decision Making
Practice-Based Primary Care Innovation and Implementation
The fellowship is based in the Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research, a large, multi-disciplinary research unit on campus.
The program is principally funded through an institutional “T32” (5 T32 14001) National Research Service Award grant through the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA).