This application describes a course of clinical experience, teaching opportunities and investigative training which will equip the candidate to occupy a position of leadership and academic expertise in the field of geriatric psychiatry. The University Health Center of Pittsburgh will provide the candidate a rich set of clinical settings in which to continue his clinical practice in geriatric psychiatry, including a multidisciplinary outpatient clinic and a newly enlarged and remodeled, 26 bed geropsychiatric inpatient unit. In the roles of clinician, consultant and teacher, the candidate will devote approximately 1 1/2 days per week to this regular program of multidisciplinary team meetings, case conferences and outpatient clinics. In the role of teacher, the candidate will be expected to assume a central role in the growing program of medical student, resident and community mental health educational programs in the University Health Center of Pittsburgh. This will include responsibility for both seminar and lecture presentations on a broad series of topics in gerontology and geriatric psychiatry, as well as the delivery of educational and case conference programs to community mental health programs in Western Pennsylvania. Because the candidate is more experienced in clinical and teaching areas, his professional development plan emphasizes a program of training and experience in clinical research. The application therefore focuses on a long term research plan whose goal is to demonstrate the heuristic value of the concept of apathy in the Mental Disorders of Late Life, in particular Alzheimer's Disease, cerebral infarction and depression. The proposed research entails, in Part I, the development of an apathy rating scale employing multiple data sources and, in Part II, the implementation of behavioral experiments designed to a) evaluate the construct validity of the scale through its ability to predict behavior b) demonstrate the responsiveness of apathetic behavior to investigator controlled interventions. To complement the investigative activities, the candidate will enroll in University course offerings in rating scale construction, statistics, and experimental design. A plan for extensive training and supervision in psychometrics is described.
NIH ExPorter
NIH ExPorter