PROJECT SUMMARY The overall goal of the Investigator Development Core (IDC) is to support the development of early career investigators, specifically junior faculty and postdoctoral scholars, in basic biomedical, behavioral, and clinical sciences at Northern Arizona University. This goal will be met through two aims that will establish a Pilot Project Program (PPP) to support faculty, and a Postdoctoral Scholar Program (PSP) to support and mentor postdoctoral researchers. The PPP will provide preliminary support and mentoring to early career investigators and to established faculty who are changing research directions toward health equity research, with the objective of generating preliminary data that will increase investigators' competitiveness for NIH and other external health- and health equity-related research funding. Funds will be provided for new projects, and for the generation or analysis of data needed for proposal revision and resubmission. The PSP program will bring a cohort of postdoctoral scholars to NAU to conduct health equity-related research in the basic biomedical, behavioral, and clinical sciences. The IDC will work closely with the Administrative Core to provide mentoring opportunities; with the Research Infrastructure Core to enhance the quality of the research design and interpretation; and with the Community Engagement Core to develop meaningful health equity research projects that serve the needs of our community partners. The proposed outcome of this IDC is to create cohorts of health equity researchers whose interactions will be interdisciplinary and thus synergistic.