The goals of the Planning and Evaluation Core (PEC) are to monitor, evaluate, and assess the progress of our U54 Partnerships in meeting its milestones, objectives, and goals. The Core supports our University of California, Riverside (UCR) – City of Hope Comprehensive Cancer Center (CoHCCC) U54 Partnership’s goals of capacity- building, education, and training. Together in this U54, UCR and CoHCCC aim to develop the collaborations, translational resources, and training programs to enhance diversity in cancer research and achieve equity in drug development - throughout the entire drug development pipeline. To achieve our PEC’s goals we are guided by four boards – the Internal Advisory Board (IAB), External Advisory Board (EAB), Community Advisory Board (CAB), and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Board (DEI). Our IAB and EAB have served a key role in guiding our P20 planning grant; in our proposed U54 these two boards will be joined by our newly created CAB and DEI. The inclusion of these two new boards underscores our U54’s commitment to 1) serving the diverse individuals that live in our Southern California communities and 2) to mentor and train a diverse early-stage investigators who are committed to eliminating our current disparities in cancer therapeutics, drug development, and access to clinical trials. Through the activities and oversight of the PEC, our four advisory boards will 1) conduct evaluation, tracking, and reporting of the progress of projects and cores and 2) provide focused feedback to program U54 leadership and investigators. As in our P20 planning grant, the U54 PEC will work with the IAB to provide a structured and rigorous review process to select new Full and Pilot projects as well as Mini-Pilots for the Capacity Core. The PEC will assess all components of our U54 partnership. The PEC will assure that the 1) Research and Evaluation Core training and education programs are effective in providing education and building capacity, 2) Outreach Core works with investigators to be inclusive of the communities we serve, and 3) Capacity Core identifies provides early-stage investigators (ESI) with mentorship in target identification, drug development, and clinical trials. We anticipate that together our Cores will play a key role in developing future U54 projects that build UCR’s capacity in drug development and clinical trials.