Enrichment, Funding, Outreach

A key tenet of the Comprehensive Liver Research Center is career development,with the objective of recruiting and mentoring the next generation of liver researchers, including those from underrepresented backgrounds. The center's world-leading expertise, highly integrated environment, and state-of-the-art cores provide an outstanding environment for early-career investigators and trainees to evolve into leaders of basic, clinical and community-engaging liver researchers.

Career development in the center is facilitated with a variety of opportunities, including seminar series, works-in-progress meetings, dedicated workshops, focus groups on various topics — including grant-writing — and the disbursement of seed funds via the Pilot and Feasibility Program. Trainees and early-career investigators benefit from the ability to network with more senior center members, who can provide valuable feedback on their work and help them derive maximum benefit from seed funding and other career development mechanisms. Early-career investigators in the UCLA Vatche and Tamar Manoukian Division of Digestive Diseases’ prestigious fellowship program, which is one of the largest of its kind in the U.S., are able to train with established leaders at the forefront of GI and liver research. The success of UCLA’s fellowship program is evident in the number of investigators who trained here on their way to becoming world leaders in their areas of work. The Comprehensive Liver Research Center is committed to training and mentoring the next generation of liver fellows recruited to the division’s fellowship program.

The center has also developed a state-of-the-art Outreach Program that will engage with key patient, community and clinician stakeholders to ensure that center research is aligned with community needs. This includes targeting research efforts to the screening, diagnosis and treatment of MASLD in diverse populations with unmet needs and ensuring a patient-centered approach to the recruitment and retention of novel research studies supported by the center.