PROJECT SUMMARY – Administrative Core American Indian and Alaska Native (ANAI) communities are increasingly asserting tribal sovereignty over research, setting their own research agendas, and building capacity to lead and conduct their own research. Southcentral Foundation (SCF), a tribal health care organization serving 65,000 ANAIs in Alaska, established a Research Department (RD) in 2006 to conduct health research for and by ANAI people that aligns with organizational and community priorities and values. Through implementation of training, grant management software, and expanded program evaluation, prior NARCH funding has strengthened the SCF RD's ability to administer and evaluate individual research projects within a diverse and burgeoning research portfolio. This Center will expand this portfolio with a focus on dissemination and implementation research designed to improve ANAI health outcomes and healthcare delivery. The overarching goal of the proposed Administrative Core is to position SCF to be competitive for large, multi-component National Institutes of Health center grants which have been awarded primarily to academic institutions. We will expand SCF's capacity—and create a new ANAI career pathway—to administer, communicate, and collaborate across multiple, simultaneous tribal research projects and teams and add critical capacity to systematically evaluate individual and collective research and capacity-building efforts. The Specific Aims of this project are to: 1) Implement an ANAI Research Administrator position and mentoring program to support the administrative, coordination, and communication needs of complex, multicomponent center grants; and 2): Institute a unified evaluation framework to assess research outcomes and processes, as well as capacity building efforts in a tribal health setting. We will develop and implement a curriculum to prepare Research Administrators to lead Center administrative tasks and ensure the Administrative Core effectively serves as the communication and coordination hub for study teams and partners and supports evaluation and oversight functions. We will use two complementary dissemination and implementation research frameworks (Reach, Effectiveness, Adoption, Implementation, and Maintenance [RE-AIM] and the Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research [CFIR]) to evaluate individual Center components and the Center overall to facilitate learning about implementation in tribal health systems. This effort will be led by Dr. Denise Dillard, an Inupiaq Eskimo psychologist who has served as the Director of the SCF RD since 2008. Julie Benson, Program Director of the $17.7 million Alaska IDeA Network of Biomedical Research Excellence, will serve as co-investigator.