ADMINISTRATIVE CORE: PROJECT SUMMARY The Virginia Commonwealth University Massey (VCU) Cancer Center (MCC) Administrative Core centrally operationalizes and promotes the MCC vision, mission, goals, and strategies by providing the overall planning and management of a full range of administrative services supporting the best practices in cancer research administration. The MCC Administrative Core is led by the Associate Director for Administration, Michelle K. Lin, MBA, who directs a team of 39 highly qualified and experienced individuals contributing to strategic planning, implementation, and evaluation efforts for all Center-sponsored initiatives. Collectively, the members of the MCC Administrative Core are directly responsible for MCC’s $41.7M annual operational research budget and more than 95,575 ft2 of assignable research and administrative space and coordinates all aspects of membership engagement activities for 147 faculty members. Essential Administrative Core functions include managing the National Cancer Institute-funded Cancer Center Support Grant (CCSG); managing consistent and effective communications, across multiple in-person and virtual platforms, with all internal and external constituents; providing administrative and business management support for MCC’s shared resources; overseeing the membership review and research productivity metrics; administering pilot research award mechanisms; and enhancing the information technology capabilities for collecting and reporting data as required for management and evaluation. Major new initiatives supported since the last CCSG renewal include organizing and developing MCC’s 2021-2025 Strategic Plan; facilitating the re-alignment of two former MCC basic research programs into one Cancer Biology Program; leading and/or directly supporting the recruitment and start-up packages for 38 new cancer research faculty; contributing to the development and submission of more than 120 research proposals to extramural funding agencies, resulting in $32M in funded multi-year awards; organizing and supporting the establishment of several new advisory entities aligned with MCC’s Community-to-Bench framework to ensure community voices are synergistically heard alongside VCU-based leadership; supporting the modeling of the new VCU Health Cancer Service Line governance and operations structure and MCC institutional funds flow model; and instituting new and revised policies for MCC membership, cancer relevance for grants and publications, and charters for all MCC committees/boards to ensure appropriate diversity and inclusion representation. Of particular note, the Administrative Core also led the development and implementation of three new offices spearheading areas for Center growth: the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion; the Office of Community Outreach and Engagement; and the Office of Cancer Research Training and Education Coordination. With the recruitment of numerous experienced cancer research a...