20/21 ABCD-USA CONSORTIUM: RESEARCH PROJECT SITE AT VCU

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Project summary Persons from marginalized communities are underrepresented in biomedical research as participants (1) such as in clinical trials (2). There is an especially acute dearth of individuals from racial minorities as biomedical scientists, including neuroscience (3). This under-representation results in reduced perspectives on culturally- sensitive assessments for neurobehavioral and neuroscience research (4), but also impoverishes public health research initiatives that may benefit health of racial minorities. This exclusion also necessitates generalization of clinical trial data of whites to other populations in the absence of data for proper inference. Therefore, to help improve inclusion in neuroscience research, the Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) site of the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study (5) seeks supplemental funding to provide an immersive human- subject biomedical research experience to Olive Calonge, who is graduating from Stony Brook University Spring 2021. They (preferred pronoun) have been selected among a highly competitive pool of applicants to the NIDA program for immersive biomedical experiences, and have expressed an interest in developmental neuroscience. Olive will be tasked with testing on-site families (VCU is fully-open for all ABCD procedures, but with physical/spatial distancing). This would include scan-year and “off-year” visits. We believe that the team could benefit from additional on-site help for these in-person visits to prevent staff burnout during peak accrual season (late Spring and Summer). Olive will be afforded opportunities to perform all tasks typical of bachelor's degreed RAs short of conducting (as sole staff member) neuroimaging sessions with cognitive task operation and a handful of other more complex tasks that require careful training and cross-site harmonization. We are confident that this hands-on interpersonal research experience will enable Olive to have a comprehensive grasp of many of the regulatory and other complexities of cross-site big-data harmonized descriptive neuroscience data collection, to further enable their career to unfold in the neurosciences.