RESEARCH TRAINING/EDUCATION CORE

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This renewal application for the Center for American Indian and Alaska Native Health Disparities (CAIANHD; P60 MD000507) is organized in terms of 4 Cores: an Administrative Core, a Research Core, a Research Training and Education (RT/E) Core, and a Community Engagement and Outreach (CE/O) Core. Spero M. Manson, Ph.D. (Pembina Chippewa), Distinguished Professor of Public Health and Psychiatry, leads the RT/E Core. Dr. Manson co-directs the Native Investigator Development Program (NIDP), and brings a wealth of experience to bear on this particular core. Indeed, he twice received the Gerontological Society of America's Distinguished Mentor Award (2006; 2007) and the Herbert W. Nickens Award from the Association of American Medical Colleges (2006) for his, training of American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/AN) investigators. Nancy Whitesell, Ph.D., Associate Professor, a developmental psychologist and statistician with extensive field experience in Native communities, also is a member of the RT/E Core. Dr. Whitesell codirects with Dr. Beals the Building Research Infrastructure for Dissemination, Goals, and Education (BRIDGE) Project, a unique, NIH-funded partnership between CAIANH and the Oglala Lakota Nation Health Administration (OSTHA) to create more effective mechanisms for research training and dissemination within the tribe. The RT/E Core houses 2 interrelated efforts that focus on promoting health disparities research capabilities among AI/AN undergraduate students at tribal colleges and universities (TC/Us) and on increasing the capacity of AI/AN MD/Ph.D.s to conduct high-quality, NIH-supported health disparities research. Few studies of the health of AI/AN people in the U.S. have been conducted by AI/AN researchers.[1] In our ongoing effort to redress this imbalance, the overarching purpose of the RT/E Core is as follows: a) increase the number of AI/AN researchers engaged in high-quality health disparities research in this special population, and b) enhance the ability of AI/AN scientists to compete successfully for externally sponsored health disparities research. We will accomplish this by capitalizing on our prior work over the last 5 years through the CAIANHD in 2 ways. First, we propose to expand our support of and involvement in the Dine College Summer Research Enhancement Program (SREP), a 10-week summer enrichment training program in public health research methods for AI/AN undergraduate students. This program, offered in collaboration with the country's oldest and largest TC/U and housed on the Navajo Nation, introduces AI/AN students to the research process and to health professions, providing them a foundation for basic public health research and evaluation. The SREP integrates concepts of holism, balance/harmony, kinship, and relatedness¿values shared by AI/AN people generally and these students in particular¿with state-of-the-art scientific methods. As we shall show, this initiative has been remarkably successful: It has attracted 48 AI/AN undergraduate students to health disparities research and led many of them to pursue advanced studies in related areas at other institutions across the country. During the proposed period of renewal, we will expand the program's research foci and replicate it at Oglala Lakota College, another TC/U located on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Second, we intend to renew the Health Disparities Research Scholar effort, which trains and mentors promising new AI/AN scientists. This objective will be accomplished by continuing to augment our unique Native Investigator Development Program (NIDP) to enable it to address a broader array of research areas than permitted by its primary sponsor, the National Institute on Aging (NIA). This 2-year, collaborative, multidisciplinary program identifies potential AI/AN investigators and facilitates their comprehensive, systematic preparation for research careers. As a collaboration between UCD and the University of Washington (UW), the NIDP has been continuously funded since 1998 by NIA, as well as by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the National Human Genome Research Institute, the National Cancer Institute, and NIMHD. It, too, has been highly successful, having trained 42 AI/AN social, behavioral, and health scientists known as Native Investigators (NIs),[2*a] who have acquired more than $90 million in NIH research funding and published almost 300 peer-reviewed journal articles. [a] A