Consortium of Rural States (CORES) Multi-Institutional Pilot Award Program

2024 Award Recipients

Project: “Leveraging causal genetic mechanisms to achieve generalizable polygenic prediction of health and disease in underrepresented populations”

About the Synergy at Dartmouth Pilot Program

The Synergy at Dartmouth Pilot Program offers funding to early- and mid-career researchers for one-year projects that are impactful, innovative, and collaborative. These clinical and translational projects are designed to pave the way for applications to larger, externally funded studies.

The program aims to:

1. Accelerate the research progress of emerging investigators by providing them with resources to gather crucial preliminary data for future applications, leading to trials of new treatments, interventions, devices, or novel diagnostic or analytical methods.

2. Encourage research addressing clinical issues significant to historically underserved and excluded groups in the Synergy at Dartmouth catchment area. These projects should also have broader applications to general healthcare.

Inter-Institutional Pilot Projects Awards

The Clinical & Translational Science Award (CTSA) program, run by the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS), aims to boost the efficiency, quality, and impact of

the process of turning scientific observations into meaningful health outcomes for both individuals and communities.

The CTSA program creates a network of medical research institutions collaborating to accelerate the translation of research into better patient care. Seven CTSA institutions have teamed up to form the Consortium of Rural States (CORES), including Synergy at Dartmouth. The aim of this request for applications (RFA) is to encourage multi-institutional collaboration by funding innovative translational science research projects that involve two or more of these CTSA institutions.

This pilot program invites proposals from faculty at all career levels for translational science projects that align with the CTSA mission of “understanding scientific or operational principles underlying a step of the translational process to develop generalizable solutions that accelerate translational research.”

Focus Areas for the CORES Pilot Program

The CORES Inter-Institutional Pilot Program supports translational science projects that identify and resolve barriers to conducting translational research. Projects should clearly outline the challenges they aim to address and propose innovative solutions to overcome them. These solutions should be broadly applicable across a range of translational research questions.

Applicants can propose projects that:

• Develop new methodologies, technologies, tools, resources, or training paradigms to address translational roadblocks.
• Demonstrate new approaches that improve the efficiency or effectiveness of translational processes, potentially leading to future clinical or translational research projects.
• Disseminate tools or strategies that can broadly promote new methodologies, technologies, tools, resources, or training paradigms to overcome translational roadblocks.

In alignment with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) strategic plan, this RFA gives priority to projects that focus on:

• Climate Change and Environmental Health
• Health Equity for Underrepresented Populations, such as pediatric groups, older adults, individuals with disabilities or rare disorders, underrepresented racial/ethnic or sexual and gender minorities, rural populations, or those with low socio-economic status.
• Rural Health
• Maternal Health.

Click here for the Request for Applications.