The University of Wisconsin is one of seven sites in the country selected for a grant award from the National Institutes of Health to advance medical training and research. The $14 million three-to-five year grant will fund the Training and Education to Advance Multidisciplinary Research, or TEAM, program.

TEAM is designed to include training for clinical researchers of the future, according to UW Medical School Professor JoAnne Robbins, the co-investigator and member of the executive committee.

“We wrote [the proposal] to capitalize on the strengths at UW,” Robbins said.

One of these strengths, Robbins added, is interdisciplinary studies.

Robbins said in addition to the Medical School, involved departments with the grant are nursing, pharmacy, engineering and nutritional sciences of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.

“The grant is actually working with multidisciplinary initiatives that were already present on campus. We will be enhancing them, bringing them together under one umbrella,” Robbins said. “This grant will really be crossing different schools at the university — a very exciting aspect.”

The grant is the largest ever issued by the NIH, according to the Capital Times.

The program, which is the largest clinical research-training program in NIH history, will include training in 10 areas at UW, including geriatrics, asthma, cancer, child health and obesity, according to a UW Hospital release.

“The NIH Roadmap is one of the most progressive initiatives now under way in health research,” Molly Carnes, the project’s principal investigator, said in a release. “When this project is completed, we will have trained a new generation of academic leaders who will be competent to design and carry out clinical research so that patient care can be based on sound evidence.”

The program also includes a community advisory consortium, of which Robbins is the chairperson. This component of TEAM is designed to translate the multidiscipline to different environments and settings across the state and not just UW, Robbins said.

“We’ve [received] great cooperation from leaders in Madison who will serve as an advisory group,” Robbins said. “We’re thrilled we got so much support — no one said no.”