The goal of the Emory Roybal Center for Dementia Caregiving Mastery is to provide support to investigators across the nation to conduct NIH Stage I-III behavioral intervention research that will enhance the context- specific role-mastery of informal caregivers of persons living with Alzheimer’s disease and similar illnesses. By 2050, as many as 20 million Americans will be living with these illnesses, and the number of informal caregivers will expand to 40-50 million. Informal caregiving is the key to the quality of life and continued community living of persons living with Alzheimer’s and similar illnesses; it is also a bulwark against rising health care costs. Our Center rests on the premise that informal caregiving is not one homogenous entity but is context-specific. As the U.S. continues to experience major reconfigurations in its social and demographic composition (we will, for instance, be a “minority majority” country by 2043), we expect caregiving to occur in an ever-increasing set of heterogeneous contexts. These contexts are framed by various illness conditions, family, cultural, or social caregiving situations, geographical location, and care recipients’ transitions through care settings, especially the acute setting. The two clinical trials proposed in this application exemplify such heterogeneous contexts: one focuses on the culturally-grounded challenges faced by Latino caregivers; the other on the situation of individuals who, newly discovering they are in the caregiving role, need immediate orientation to the role. Our Center’s second assertion is that interventions developed to address these contexts must be designed with the involvement of caregivers/consumers from within these contexts (as have the two proposed trials). Our Center builds on the successes of our first cycle of nationally competed projects (13 supported projects, most from national investigators), the majority of which have or are poised to receive support for advancement to the next stage of development and testing. The Center is anchored in a set of existing collaborations with other AD Roybal Centers and key national networks of Alzheimer’s and caregiver researchers (e.g., the IMPACT Collaboratory) and investigators engaged in geriatrics and gerontology research. Through webinars and a national Caregiver Research Interest Group, our Center will continue to engage investigators and consumers in discussions about and design of interventions. Acting as a kind of “academic venture capital enterprise,” we will employ established structures and processes to attract competitive trial applications, guide investigators in the development of effective trial proposals, apply rigorous methods for selecting meritorious proposals, and, through our Behavioral Intervention Development Core, mentor and monitor supported trials to ensure intervention trial success. Through our Consult Service, we will work with supported investigators to produce tangible returns on our “invest...