Established in 2020, the Department of Medicine’s K Awardee to R Advancement Training Program (KARAT) supports NIH K-award recipients and other comparable mentored Career Development Awardees (CDAs) with a broad range of career development activities and academic support. Now in its fifth year, the KARAT community has grown to include roughly 65 highly promising junior faculty poised to become the next generation of independent principal investigators.

The phase between mentored research (K grant) and successful independent research program (R01) grant is a crucial phase in one’s academic career with a range of challenges inherent to the establishment of an independent research career, both long-standing and evolving due to the current changes in scientific funding. The KARAT program is dedicated to supporting this critical transition.

To support this objective, the KARAT program offers a broad range of career development activities and academic support including grant writing workshops, grant reviews, academic skills training, networking, and peer support for our CDA awardees. Additionally, KARAT members are eligible to compete for KARAT Catalytic Grants, which provide ‘seed’ funding to generate new ideas or preliminary data in preparation for submitting an R01 or equivalent grant. This past year, a total of 16 awards were presented—8 Catalyst awards and 8 Spark (bridge funding) awards—to faculty across 6 divisions and institutes for projects ranging from basic to translational to clinical research. The Catalyst awardees continue to demonstrate the breadth and depth of talented early career faculty in the DOM.

Since assuming leadership of KARAT in 2024, Aditi Gurkar, PhD, has continued the vision and dedication of the program’s founder, Oliver Eickelberg, MD, and recently launched a new programming strategy –“At the Helm: How to set up a successful Research program” – that consists of in-person sessions focused on networking and expert panel discussions on a range of topics relevant to launching a thriving independent research career, such as developing fundable projects, personnel management, collaborative science, and grant strategies. Future plans for the KARAT Program include an in-house peer-review program, where a review committee consisting of DOM faculty with extensive study section experience will provide feedback on the ‘R’ grants submitted by the KARAT cohort.

Dr. Gurkar, an assistant professor at the Aging Institute and in the Division of Geriatric Medicine, will continue to further develop the KARAT initiative, as part of her new role as the Associate Vice Chair for Academic Advancement. Dr. Gurkar was awarded the K99/R00 Pathway to Independence award in 2014 from the National Institute on Aging (NIA) and this enabled her to start her research program dedicated to understanding biological at the Aging Institute. An alumna of the KARAT Program herself, Dr. Gurkar sees this new position as an opportunity to support the career advancement of other researchers within the DOM:

“As Winston Churchill once said, ‘We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.’ I view my role as an advocate—someone who helps early career researchers develop the skills, confidence, and independence necessary to transition from career development to independent research programs. I am looking forward to all the impactful and exciting science that our KARAT members will contribute to the academic community and the leaders they will become.”