MENTORING AND RESEARCH IN PATIENT-ORIENTED INTEGRATIVE MEDICINE The renewal Midcareer K24 Award is for Dr. Chenchen Wang to continue her mentoring of the next generation of physician-scientists and to contribute to patient-oriented Integrative Medicine research. Dr. Wang is Professor at Tufts University School of Medicine and Director of the Center for Complementary and Integrative Medicine and holds a strong record of research, publication, and mentoring. Her long-term goal is to advance the science of Integrative Medicine to promote health and healing. Her immediate goals are to obtain protected time to expand and strengthen her innovative, multi-method, and multidisciplinary translational research and mentoring programs for chronic disabling conditions. In the First Four Years of the K24, the PI has completed four major NIH-funded clinical trials studying comparative effectiveness of mind-body interventions for chronic musculoskeletal pain, developing integrative treatment approaches in military and veterans populations, and provided groundbreaking evidence on neurobiological and physiological responses to mind-body interventions. In this period, the PI published 61 articles, 8 as first author and 53 as senior author. The PI and her mentored team also received a new R01-like grant from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs to investigate the efficacy of a mind-body intervention for veterans suffering with Gulf War Illness. During the initial K24 period, she has been primary or co-primary mentor for 23 trainees with doctoral degrees. Her trainees authored 41 first-authored peer-reviewed publications and had 64 co-authorships. Ten of her trainees have their own NIH or other career grants. Dr. Wang’s multidisciplinary mentoring program, as well as her expertise on mind-body interventions, has been fully integrated into the research and teaching infrastructure of the Tufts Clinical and Translational Science Institute. With access to these outstanding resources and a long-recognized diverse training environment, her selected mentees will continue to obtain training in the rigorous scientific methodology, integrity, ethics, and grant applications necessary to stimulate high-quality, translational, patient-oriented research. The goal of this proposed K24 renewal is to build upon previous and current findings of the PI’s NIH-funded studies to: 1) expand and evaluate translational Integrative Medicine research for chronic disabling conditions in order to inform and benefit medical practice; 2) advance fundamental neuroscience and human biology research to understand the mechanisms of mind-body approaches, with the goal to improve chronic pain management; 3) identify critical unmet needs of novel effective therapies for managing symptoms; and 4) further strengthen the comprehensive interdisciplinary mentoring plan and extend opportunities to new scientists to guide future generations of Integrative Medicine researchers. This K24 renewal will therefore...