Dear DUPRI Colleagues,
I am touching base with you all as we approach the end of the spring semester to bring you up to date on all that has been happening with DUPRI and its affiliated centers this year. DUPRI is a network of cooperating centers that shares staff and spatial resources in association with the Social Science Research Institute (SSRI). The core centers in this network include the Center for Population Health and Aging, the Duke Network Analysis Center, and the Duke Center for Population Research, but each has other affiliated centers as well. Each core center has distinctive intellectual aims and research needs, but many faculty have overlapping memberships across these centers. The bases for these overlapping memberships include common interests in excellence and scientific impact in (1) research on the social bases of physical and mental health across the lifespan and across social contexts; (2) innovative data collection and analysis strategies to enrich our knowledge of lives across time and space; and (3) training and mentorship of the next generation of population scientists.
Much work has been done in the last two years to secure the scaffolding of our networked organization of population scientists. Our primary efforts have been directed at winning university and federally funded support for the DUPRI center infrastructure (principally staffing and programmatic space). The NIA P30 center grant awarded September 2014 to the Center for Population Health and Aging (CPHA) is the first weight-bearing component of this scaffolding. The second to be reviewed at NICHD shortly is the PRC grant proposal for a general population dynamics center called the Duke Population Research Center (DPRC). The third is the Duke Network Analysis Center (DNAC) that is pending award as a NIH R25 center. We have received university support directly from the Dean of Arts & Sciences and the Provost office and indirectly from the Provost through the Social Science Research Institute. This support has come (with more to come conditional on funding) as direct support for staff, programming and new space.
DUPRI also responded to the SSRI $250k Challenge for innovative proposals for data analysis this Spring and has been recognized to move to a second round of discussions with the DUHS to establish a Duke infrastructure to support regular mechanisms for collaboration between population scientists and DUHS through access to medical center databases and collaborations on clinical research projects. This negotiation is in progress. You will be invited to participate in this process, with an initial meeting on Monday April 27th (the announcement has been transmitted to you). This promises to be a long-term signature program for population science at Duke. It will probably take the next half year to develop such an infrastructure, but we have the active attention of Medical Center folks and we ask for your involvement in the months to come.
Currently, we are working to submit a continuation of the NIA supported T32 training grant supporting doctoral and postdoctoral students in the social and economic demography of aging, which we have had for over 25 years. If you have been invited to become involved in this effort (which faces a May 25, 2015 deadline), please respond. If you are interested in being involved, please contact DUPRI.
Finally, woven through all these efforts has been a robust emergent collaboration with UNC-Chapel Hill’s Carolina Population Center. You have probably noticed announcements of jointly sponsored seminars and speakers. NIH funding has already resulted from this collaboration. Our hope is that more collaboration will come in the future.
This has all been possible because Duke has a productive and growing network of scientists making groundbreaking contributions in population studies, not only on human populations but also primate populations, at the ecological, social and molecular levels.
Best,
Angie
Angela M. O’Rand, Ph.D.
Professor of Sociology and Director of the Duke Population Research Institute and
the Center for Population Health and Aging
Duke University
Box 90088
264 Soc/Psych
Durham NC 27708