Note: Johanna Olson, MD, SC CTSI K scholar and assistant professor of pediatrics, is an adolescent medicine physician specializing in the care of transgender youth and gender variant children at the USC-affiliated Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles (CHLA). She was featured in a Dateline special called “Living a Transgender Childhood”.

In this episode of Dateline, viewers explore the story of eleven-year-old Josie Romero, a child who was biologically born as a boy but who is now living as a transgendered girl. Dr. Olson is Josie’s physician and appears on this broadcast of Dateline to discuss Josie’s story and comment on the current gaps in research and knowledge around gender non-conforming youth.

What viewers don’t know from watching this episode of Dateline is that Dr. Olson is not passively waiting for those medical research gaps to close. In 2011, she applied for, and was awarded, a competitive KL2 Mentored Research Career Development Award through the NIH-funded Southern California Clinical and Translational Science Institute (SC CTSI).

The KL2 program is a comprehensive, three-year research career development program for health professionals and individuals with research doctoral degrees who wish to pursue formal training and a career in clinical and translational research. The SC CTSI accepts four applicants per year to the KL2 program with the goal of training the next generation of clinical and translational researchers.

When Dr. Olson completes the program, she will be equipped with the knowledge she needs to successfully navigate an often complex research advancement process and the tools that will help her more easily advance research discoveries that will close knowledge gaps standing between her patients’ unmet medical needs and their improved health.

Learn more about the SC CTSI KL2 Scholar program