Self Assessment
The Toxic Substances Research and Teaching Program, a UC Systemwide Multi-campus Research Unit (MRU) with activities on all 9 UC campuses, has been in operation for almost 12 years. In that time, we have partially supported the research of more than 400 faculty and upwards of 800 students and postdoctoral fellows performing basic research in various fields of study relevant to the broad topic of "toxic substances". Since the inception of the program, we have attempted to track the progress of student trainees, so we have available a partial database of names and first job locations of students and postdoctoral fellows who we have trained over the life of the program. We now propose to build upon this partial database to systematically examine the career paths of past graduate students and postdoctoral trainees who have graduated from the program, using as a primary research tool a survey of all past trainees that can be located. Past trainees will be located by last known address in our records, assistance from former mentors, their department administrators, campus alumni files, and by tracking grant and contract activity databases such as the NIH gopher. We further propose to develop methods to examine the future career progress of this cohort of past trainees, and eventually of current and future trainees as well, to longitudinally track the economic and intellectual impact of our program on the State of California and on the
United States as a whole. We anticipate locating at least 90% of former trainees; high response rates will be encouraged by aggressive e-mail and telephone follow-up to retrieve completed questionnaires.
As a second goal of this proposal, we will use survey questionnaires to all past and present faculty (that we can locate) that have been associated with the TSR&TP to attempt to identify any patents or forms of direct technology transfer to the business sector arising from research partially funded by the TSR&TP. We anticipate locating upwards of 90% of former faculty; response rates will be enhanced by e-mail and telephone follow-up as aggressively as we can.
As Director of the TSR&TP MRU since its inception, the PI has all of the necessary files and databases available to perform this study, and the administrative resources to deal with the logistics of data acquisition and computerized data reduction. The Coinvestigators, Professor Bradshaw and Ms. Ellerbrock, have the requisite training (via post-graduate degrees and on-thejob experience) in sociology, economics, survey methodology, and database handling to properly design and execute the questionnaire and survey components of this study, and to assist the PI in interpretation of the study findings.