The goal of the P30 Duke Transdisciplinary Prevention Research Center (TPRC) is to facilitate the translation of basic-science knowledge about regulatory processes and peer influences into innovative research efforts to prevent substance use and related problems in adolescents. During our initial five-year tenure as a NIDA-funded P20 TPRC, these themes have unified and catalyzed Center investigators who study the development and prevention of substance use at the intrapersonal, interpersonal, and institutional levels. As stipulated by NIH, a P30 Center does not directly conduct empirical investigations but, rather, exists to enhance funded projects and members. The TPRC has successfully initiated a broad intellectual community that includes 19 faculty members from 8 administrative departments and 7 disciplines, ranging from pharmacology and genetics to economics and sociology (plus 5 subdisciplines of psychology), who lead 25 externally funded collaborative research grants.
Four specific aims guide this application. First, the TPRC will foster the innovative translation of theories across disciplines and projects, for the purposes of enhancing currently funded projects and generating new studies. Translation of theory will cross four steps of prevention science: basic development, efficacy trials, effectiveness trials, and dissemination. Second, the TPRC will provide advanced methodological and data-analytic services to funded projects. Third, the TPRC will contribute to the nascent science of dissemination and implementation by discovering ways to influence practitioners, agency directors, school leaders, and policy makers to implement evidence-based prevention efforts at scale with fidelity. Theory in regulatory processes and peer influence will guide this effort. Finally, the TPRC will contribute to the training of the next generation of prevention scientists by enhancing ongoing funded training programs and by employing predoctoral and postdoctoral scholars-in training to serve as junior investigators in the cores. The TPRC will be evaluated internally and externally.
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