Overall: Eunice Kennedy Shriver Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Research Center at Vanderbilt

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Founded in 1965 as one of the original Intellectual and Developmental Disorders Research Centers (IDDRC), the Vanderbilt Kennedy Center (VKC) IDDRC serves as the central nexus across Vanderbilt for interdisciplinary research, communication, and training in intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD). The VKC IDDRC serves as a trans-institutional institute that brings together over 200 faculty from 38 departments in 10 schools at Vanderbilt. The VKC’s mission to facilitate discoveries that inform best practices to improve the lives of people with IDD and their families. This mission is met by leveraging our outstanding institutional resources and support, partnering with disability communities, and capitalizing on synergistic interactions across the VKC’s federally-designated centers: the VKC IDDRC, a University Center of Excellence in Developmental Disabilities and a Leadership Education in Neurodevelopmental Disabilities program. The IDDRC as the centerpiece of the VKC is the foundational organizing structure that creates a “Center culture” wherein research and discovery permeates the VKC’s broader training and service activities, thus enhancing the translational research goals of the IDDRC. Demonstrable IDDRC success includes 976 investigator- authored publications and robust NIH funding to Vanderbilt to support IDD-related research ($52.6M in FY20). Harnessing and leveraging this trans-institutional strength to focus on unique challenges in IDD, the overarching goal of the next phase of the IDDRC is to develop precision care for IDD by providing infrastructure and scientific leadership to enable rapid translation of basic discoveries into high- impact IDD interventions and treatments. Three global Aims guide the IDDRC’s work. Aim 1 provides core services to enable and disseminate impactful research on individualizing treatments based upon the causes, mechanisms, and contributing co-morbid sequelae of IDD; Aim 2 focuses on incorporating innovative methods and approaches to enhance multidisciplinary IDD research; and Aim 3 proposes to conduct a signature research project to improve the precision use of antipsychotic medication in people with autism. Across these Aims and five Cores supported by the IDDRC (Administrative, Clinical Translational, Translational Neuroscience, Behavioral Phenotyping, and Data Sciences), three themes permeate our work: (1) recruitment of highly-skilled researchers not currently conducting IDD research (non-traditional researchers); (2) inclusion of IDD participants into research studies that currently do not include IDD (non-traditional subjects); and (3) incorporation of novel scientific approaches and methods (non-traditional approaches). Our IDDRC is ideally posed to enable rapid discovery of precision care approaches by supporting 50 investigators leading 70 research projects (15 from NICHD) and, as highlighted by the Signature Research Project, to promote and implement generative, novel, and impactful research directions, thus meeting the NICHD’s vision of applying newly evolved technologies and approaches to rapidly accelerate the prevention and/or amelioration of IDDs.