Community Engagement Core (CEC): ABSTRACT The overarching mission of the Texas A&M Center for Environmental Health Research (TiCER) is “Building on TAMU’s ongoing investments in people and facilities and a history of state-wide outreach to community stakeholders, with a particular focus on climate change and underserved populations.” The goal is to promote research translation and accelerate basic, applied, and community-focused studies to advance innovative solutions for addressing exposure-stressor interactions in underserved populations in urban and urbanizing areas in Texas. The Community Engagement Core (CEC) will be the primary conduit for bi-directional communication between Center members and communities across and within the Texas Urban Triangle (TUT). The mission of the CEC is to develop, test, and disseminate data-driven community engagement outcomes and interventions which increase local resilience to existing environmental risks in lieu of climate change, particularly in underserved communities. This mission will be accomplished by addressing three key elements of bi- directional engagement. The problem identification element will focus on engaging communities to identify and prioritize health concerns related to acute environmental emergency events. The development of prevention and intervention strategies will focus on the use of citizen science, community design, and tools to help solve community problems which can be used to scale-up successful translation activities of the CEC to communities beyond our initial partners. The communication of findings and identification of disparities will focus on the communication of scientific findings to residents and stakeholders, as well as the revelation of specific conditional inequalities across communities and regions, namely related to marginalized areas. The decision- and policy- making element will apply the research findings of Center members to the development of evidence-based policies in coordination with community stakeholders, enabling long-term improvements in public health and lowering risk and vulnerability levels related to environmental emergency events. The leaders of the CEC have an established track record of collaborative, interdisciplinary, and community-engaged projects and are well positioned to transmit community priorities to Center members and facilitate the translation of Center findings to protect the publics’ health and achieve more informed decision-making across the continuum of stakeholders, from individuals to communities to policy makers.