RAND proposes to continue and expand its Center for the Study of Aging, until now an NIA-funded P20 exploratory center, for another five years. We propose sustaining the Center as an NIA-funded research and development center (P30), including cores for administrative and research support (A), program development (B), external innovative network development (C), and external research resources support and dissemination (D). The new Center will support research on the health and economic status of aging. This research is currently carried out by two P01 program projects, elements of a third P01 and a P50, and roughly 20 separately funded individual projects. While these studies will make important individual contributions to the state of knowledge in this area, the P30 will greatly increase their coordination, integration, productivity, and impact in the following ways: providing for the unified development of data and computing services needed by multiple projects; facilitating communication and cooperation across research projects; developing research ideas with high potential but some risk into proposals for R01s and R03s; more fully integrating new junior researchers into the mainstream of going research at RAND; facilitating the recruitment and integration of mid-level researchers into aging research at use; disseminating and promoting the use of three extraordinary sets of panel data on families, wealth, and health in and outside RAND who are interested in aging; familiarizing social scientists with the latest biomedical research on aging; and adapting research findings from single or multiple projects into research briefs accessible and of interest to the broad policy community. The new Center will continue taking advantage of the RAND institutional environment including the many infrastructural resources relating to commuting, analysis, and dissemination and the organization's willingness to contribute funds toward research during transitional periods. The coherence of the Center's activities and of the research it supports will be enhanced through two means: centralizing the direction of all cores and the Center itself in one individual and establishing an oversight committee including the PI, the director of the program in which the P30 will be housed, and the leader of several of the supported projects.
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