COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT CORE: PROGRAM SUMMARY/ABSTRACT Racial and ethnic health disparities persist, despite numerous mitigation efforts. It is indisputable that community engagement in research is essential for developing and translating research to address these disparities. An infrastructure to support community/academic research partnership development, implementation, and translation of research findings into real-world settings is essential. The Meharry Community Engagement Core (MCEC), established in the current grant cycle, is the first organized unit at Meharry that exclusively supports community engaged research. Led by Meharry researchers with extensive community engaged research experience, working in partnership with community stakeholders, the MCEC “connects community members and organizations with Meharry researchers to conduct research and share results that will improve health for communities that experience the poorest health outcomes.” The goal of the MCEC is to support high impact, community engaged research and facilitate timely dissemination and translation of results into sustainable real-world settings. In the next cycle, the following aims will be implemented in support of this goal: Specific Aim 1. Support existing and facilitate new long-term relationships with CBOs and other community stakeholders. Select activities: Build/maintain a coalition of stakeholders using existing (e.g., pairing them to research roles/topics of interest) and new (e.g., broadly sharing lay dissemination products from CBO/academic partnerships) strategies and foster collaboration between community stakeholders and Research/Pilot project investigators by facilitating co-development of community-prioritized research questions. Specific Aim 2. Enhance existing and implement new strategies to increase community participation in research and recruitment and retention of study participants. Select activities: Increase opportunities for community input and participation in research by expanding number and type of researchers that leverage CE Studios8. Increase the number of participants in the Meharry Research Partners Database, a Meharry-only research participant registry, by implementing Meharry student-developed social marketing campaigns. Specific Aim 3. Enhance and expand research dissemination and translation efforts among diverse stakeholder groups and audiences. Select activities: Increase lay dissemination of results from CBO/academic partnerships by including it as an expected deliverable during partnership development. Support planning processes to translate research findings into community/system-level changes by facilitating modified versions of translation studios in which the focus will be on identifying next steps, feasibility of next steps/alternatives, resources, and sustainability.