IATIEID Application

The application package includes the online program application form and all attachments, as follows:

1. One-page career statement, indicating why you would be a good fit for the program and how program objectives complement your career goals.
2. Current and comprehensive curriculum vitae (not a resume).
3. Two letters of recommendation from professionals who have worked with you as an academic mentor, professor or collaborator (PDF of scanned, signed original).
4. Academic transcript from doctoral or terminal degree program and a copy of your diploma.
5. Evidence of fluency in both English and Spanish. For native English speakers, please submit a statement describing your life or classroom experiences that support your ability to converse with moderate fluency in Spanish. Include evidence of prior formal training in Spanish (relevant transcripts, etc.). For native Spanish speakers, please submit similar documentation for English language fluency. TOEFL or IELTS scores should be submitted, if available. Language fluency will also be assessed during interviews as part of the application process.
6. A one-page Challenge Question Response - The goal of this program is to challenge participants from diverse backgrounds (e.g., liberal arts, engineering, public health, medicine, business) to work as a team from their different perspectives and to design and implement a new device, intervention, or innovative technique to solve or mitigate a problem related to an emerging infectious disease. Participants will be posed with several challenges in the area of emerging infectious diseases relevant in the Americas and will be asked to select one of these as their group project.
   As part of the application process, please submit a one-page description of how you would conceptualize and address one of the challenges from the perspective of your own academic discipline. You are not expected to be a scientific expert in the field/topic; however, these topics are similar to those that fellows will confront, and you are expected to be willing to engage with other researchers on whatever topic is chosen as the challenge.

1. Chagas disease, or American trypanosomiasis, is an increasingly important emerging infectious disease in the Americas, due to increased migration from endemic areas, the risk of transmission from blood products that may not be adequately screened, and due to the fact that long-term sequelae are most preventable if the infection is treated early, when symptoms are often absent. Compounding these problems is the fact that pregnant women with asymptomatic infection may transmit the infection to their fetuses before birth. To date, there are no reliable methods to detect congenital Chagas disease. From the perspective of your own discipline, explain how you would think about developing or evaluating new tools or strategies to detect congenital (mother to fetus) transmission of Chagas disease. What would be the important questions from your discipline-specific perspective, and how would you work with other post-docs from other disciplines to find solutions to this problem?
2. Tuberculosis (TB) is a major cause of morbidity and mortality in many countries, especially in resource-poor areas that lack modern laboratory facilities for detection and monitoring of TB cases. TB presents many challenges, including inadequate methods to reliably detect cases, risk of airborne transmission from undetected cases in communities, poor response to drug treatment related to poor compliance and/or drug resistance, and social stigma due to associations with poverty and HIV/AIDS. Confirmation of the diagnosis of TB in young children is particularly difficult due to the insensitivity of the gold standard test (TB culture) and due to the absence of clinical specimens that are reliably culture-positive when TB is present. Increasingly, there is interest in biomarkers that may be correlated with the presence of TB disease, or which serve as proxy tools to measure the response to TB therapy in individual patients. These biomarkers range from simply physical measurements (e.g., frequency of cough, body weight) to sophisticated immunologic markers (e.g., cytokines). From the perspective of your own discipline, explain how you would think about selecting and evaluating new biomarkers or strategies to detect tuberculosis or monitor response to treatment for patients with tuberculosis. What would be the important questions from your discipline-specific perspective, and how would you work with other post-docs from other disciplines to find solutions to this problem?
3. Viral agents of infectious disease are particularly difficult to detect and control in resource-poor areas due to the fact that simple, inexpensive tools based on microscopy and agar culture do not work for these diseases. Many of these viral diseases receive inadequate research funding and would qualify as neglected tropical diseases. Insect-borne diseases, such as dengue, and viral agents of diarrhea, such as noroviruses, are some examples. Because of these challenges in detection, monitoring, and control of these diseases, new approaches are needed to create model systems (to assess interventions without the use of human subjects) and to improve detection and monitoring capabilities. From the perspective of your own discipline, explain how you would think about selecting and evaluating new model systems or new tools for detection of one of these neglected viral diseases. What would be the important questions from your discipline-specific perspective, and how would you work with other post-docs from other disciplines to find solutions to this problem?