The Population Research Center (PRC) at the University of Texas at Austin requests an 8th round of NICHD support for its population infrastructure program. Continued support will help the PRC maintain its tradition of outstanding scholarship, mentoring junior scientists, and developing innovative collaborative and interdisciplinary research. The PRC provides the intellectual and infrastructural resources necessary for the highest level of population research. Those infrastructural resources held in common include state-of-the-art administrative, computing, and program development resources which support both individual and collaborative research agendas. Hailing from 14 departments across the university, 63 researchers are supported by active collaborators and mentors, topical working groups and a brownbag series to encourage intellectual exchange and idea development, and dedicated space to encourage formal and informal communication and to conduct research. PRC researchers are especially renowned for their research in five over-lapping and reinforcing thematic areas: Health Disparities;Religion and Demographic Processes;Children, Youth and Families: Education and the Transition to Adulthood;and Latin American and Border Demography. As we describe in this application, the PRC's Development, Administration, and Computing and Information cores play fundamental roles in developing and sustaining outstanding research in these and other areas. The Development Core is an especially vital component which sponsors interdisciplinary working groups, the highly successful proposal boot camp focused on junior researchers, and seed grants to launch innovative collaborative projects. The administration and computing cores are also critical components in facilitating research innovation. In the short term, these cores support the production of grant applications;the timely development, sharing, and dissemination of project and public use data files;the development of secure data enclaves and electronic file sharing;and project analysis and development of scientific publications. Over the long term, these cores provide the necessary institutional base to: build a strong scientific community among population scientists at UT;recruit, retain, and develop a cadre of outstanding population scientists;and develop research programs that take full advantage of the facilities and sophisticated technologies necessary for large-scale studies in the population sciences. The PRC now has its largest grant portfolio with over $27 million dollars in total federal grant support, of which $23.5 million is from NIH. Continued R24 support will enable the PRC to continue its strong upward trajectory as an outstanding center in which innovative population research is developed, supported and sustained.
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