Research Infrastructure for Demographic and Behavioral Population Science Developmental Core

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The function of the developmental infrastructure core is to encourage and support population research, with an emphasis on innovative, interdisciplinary research and the development of new and early stage investigators. We have provided this encouragement and support through pilot project grants, early career awards (salary support that protects the time of promising junior faculty), a grant-writing residency, and working groups. We have provided assistance to researchers in all three of our signature themes: poverty and inequality, sexual and reproductive health, and family demography and the transition to adulthood, as well as supporting individual research in related areas, such as the demography of aging, longevity, and refugee health. Consistent with our forward-looking stance toward emerging research approaches, we have recently begun to support projects that can help develop the new themes we discussed earlier in the application: genetic and epigenetic processes and the social environment; and agent-based computational demography (See Section D of the Program Overview). We think the role of the developmental infrastructure core is not merely to passively receive proposals and decide which to fund but rather to also proactively encourage and develop promising research areas.