Project Description
The goal of the P30 Duke Transdisciplinary Prevention Research Center (TPRC) was 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. As stipulated by the National Institutes of Health, a P30 Center does not directly conduct empirical investigations but, rather, exists to enhance funded projects and members. The TPRC successfully initiated a broad intellectual community that included 19 faculty members from eight administrative departments and seven disciplines, ranging from pharmacology and genetics to economics and sociology, who led 25 externally funded collaborative research grants.
Project Aims
The specific aims of the TPRC were:
- Foster innovative translation of theories across disciplines and projects for the purposes of enhancing currently funded projects and generating new studies.
- Provide advanced methodological and data-analytic services to funded projects.
- Contribute to 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.
- Contribute to the training of the next generation of prevention scientists by enhancing ongoing funded training programs by employing predoctoral and postdoctoral scholars-in-training to serve as junior investigators.