PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT Dementia family caregivers frequently experience persistent musculoskeletal pain. Pain is often made worse by performing caregiving tasks, impairing dementia family caregivers’ ability to provide care. Dementia family caregivers’ who have pain often have co-existing emotional and psychological health challenges, such as high negative emotions and/or comorbid depression, which makes managing their pain and their caregiving tasks more difficult. The objective of this K99/R00 proposal is to develop Dr. Shelbie Turner’s capacity to conduct translational research to support dementia family caregivers’ health and well-being through improved management of their own persistent pain. Dr. Turner will work towards five training objectives in the K99 phase of the project. Doing so will allow her to develop and transition to an independent investigator who designs, adapts, evaluates, and disseminates innovative, evidence-based interventions to prevent or mitigate dementia family caregivers’ negative health outcomes, with a focus on the problem of persistent pain and associated symptoms (e.g., negative emotions) and comorbidities (e.g., depression). First, she will add to and extend her knowledge in core substantive areas to include pain, negative emotions, dementia caregiving, and health behavior change. Second, she will improve her ability to develop, implement, and disseminate behavioral interventions with an emphasis on both pain management interventions and caregiver interventions. Third, she will gain experience needed to design and conduct clinical trials, including conventional, pragmatic, and adaptive clinical trials with dementia family caregivers. Finally, she will pursue professional development opportunities in grant writing (fourth training objective) and leadership and collaboration (fifth training objective). The three research aims of this application will progress as follows. Aim 1 adapts an evidence- based pain self-management intervention, Problem Adaptation Therapy for Pain in Primary Care (PATH-Pain), for use by dementia family caregivers with persistent pain. Aim 2 tests the usability of the adapted intervention with dementia family caregivers, and Aim 3 examines the feasibility, acceptability, and preliminary efficacy of the intervention through a pilot randomized controlled trial. The adapted intervention will be the first evidence- based pain self-management program customized specifically for dementia family caregivers. The proposed project is consistent with NIA’s mission to conduct behavioral research on aging and foster the development of research scientists in aging. It is aligned with NIA’s special interests in dementia caregiver intervention research and pain management research. Dr. Turner proposes to pursue her developmental goals and begin the proposed research with the support of the Division of Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College of Cornell University, which provides...