Training in Health Policy Research

The Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies houses the training program in Transdisciplinary Health Policy Research (TdHPR) which offers fellowships for postdoctoral and predoctoral scholars.

The TdHPR program trains researchers, policymakers, and practitioners to develop innovative approaches to complex policy problems in health and healthcare. From our perspective, such policies can range from proposals to revamp the health care system to better guidelines for clinicians to apply in daily practice. The program emphasizes how to use perspectives, tools, and theories of multiple academic disciplines and fields. The program seeks to train scholars to be fluent and to translate across the multiple “languages” of health policy. The goal is not just to do excellent research, but research with methods and findings sufficiently
well-grounded that one can confidently offer them for use by
policymakers.

Program and Curriculum

The program recruits scholars with backgrounds in the clinical sciences, health services, humanities, policy science, public health, and social and behavioral sciences. During 1-3 years of training, scholars gain the skills, orientations, and experiences to conduct policy research that crosses and combines disciplines.

IHPS co-sponsors the TdHPR training program with the Institute for Health and Aging (IHA) at the UCSF School of Nursing. Faculty at the UCSF School of Pharmacy also actively participate in the program. Program leadership is provided by the IHPS Director and the IHPS Associate Director for Training who work closely with the IHPS/IHA fellowship committee.

The TdHPR training program provides an integrated curriculum of coursework, career mentoring, and supervised research that emphasizes learning by doing. The curriculum includes:

• writing and works-in-progress seminars;
  
• ethical issues related to project sponsorship, paper authorship, and collaborative relationships;
  
• guest speakers including fellow-invited speakers, IHPS Grand Rounds, and the Chancellor’s Health Policy Research Lectures;
  
• additional coursework including:
• principles and approaches to policy analysis;
• designing and undertaking policy-relevant research;
• trans-disciplinary approaches to research methods.

Fellows participate in research under the guidance of a research mentor. In general, fellows are engaged in 1-3 research projects at UCSF as well as working on their own independent research projects. In addition to the research mentors, fellows also have a career mentor who helps ensure that fellows make good progress while in the program towards their career goals. Stipends follow the NIH scale, from $36,996 to $51,036 (plus benefits), depending on years of postdoctoral experience.

Inquiries and Applications

Ernestine Florence
Fellowship Coordinator
Email: Ernestine.Florence@ucsf.edu
Phone: 415.476.4924
Fax: 415.476.0705

Application Form