Five years of core support is requested for competitive renewal of the John F. Kennedy Center for Research on Human Development of Vanderbilt University. The Kennedy Center's NICHD Mental Retardation Research Center grant, now in it's 25th year, supports an interdisciplinary, interdepartmental and intercollegiate program, bringing the principles and tools of the behavioral and biomedical sciences to bear in preventing and solving important problems arising in the course of human development. The mission of the Kennedy Center is to conduct and support collaborative research, training, and information dissemination on behavioral, intellectual, and brain development. The Kennedy Center's aims are to better understand children's development, to present and solve developmental problems, and to enable people with developmental disabilities to lead better lives. The Kennedy Center's programs are built on the assumption that significant scientific discoveries and solutions to problems arise at the interface of fields of study and at the junction of the University and the larger community of which the Kennedy Center is a part. As a result, the Kennedy Center strives to reduce barriers to full participation of faculty across disciplinary, departmental, and collegiate lines and to the exchange of participants from within and outside the academic community, in the service of a common goal of preventing and solving problems of human development. The Kennedy Center's major research activities are organized into five institutes that correspond to functional research groups of investigators whose members interact regularly, sharing theoretical orientations and methodologies, but who vary widely in the academic backgrounds. The five institutes include the: (1) Institute for Developmental Neuroscience, (2) Institute on Development and Psychopathology, (3) Institute on Biobehavioral Development and Genetics, (4) Institute on Prevention, Early Intervention, and Families, (5) Institute on Education and Learning. To coordinate and facilitate these research programs, five Core Units will provide supportive services: (a) Administrative Services, (b)Neuroscience Services, (c) Communication Services, (d) Quantitative Services, and (e) Behavioral Science Services.
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