FACULTY DEVELOPMENT CORE SUMMARY/ABSTRACT Recruitment and retention of a diverse biomedical faculty workforce is necessary for the National Institutes of Health mission of discovery and innovation toward improving human health. However, the success of this mission requires institutions to change their culture so that faculty who belong to historically disadvantaged and underrepresented racial and ethnic groups do not face challenges such as marginalization, lack of appropriate mentoring, lack of visibility and recognition of scholarly achievements, and tokenism. Our long-term goal is to transform institutional culture at The University of New Mexico (UNM) to systemically achieve diversity of the biomedical workforce and sustained inclusive excellence. Recent efforts led by the National Science Foundation UNM ADVANCE program have begun to support cultural change towards inclusive excellence at UNM. Yet, transformation requires hiring, promoting, and retaining diverse early career faculty, a recalcitrant challenge among NIH-funded institutions across the U.S. The central hypothesis of this proposal is that the UNM FIRST program will successfully hire, promote, and retain a cohort of early career faculty who will accelerate significant discoveries in the interdisciplinary fields of neuroscience and data science. The specific aims of the UNM FIRST Faculty Development Core are: to establish a program that reduces isolation and increases community building for the UNM FIRST faculty hires (AIM #1); to develop personalized faculty career and research development plans for each of the UNM FIRST faculty hires (AIM #2); to develop a retention toolkit for the UNM FIRST faculty cohort (AIM #3). The proposed mentoring plan, networking activities, professional development resources and retention toolkit will be institutionalized thanks to the Institutional Innovation Implementation Board (I3 Board), that includes key administrators and stakeholders at UNM who have committed to UNM Institutional support of the UNM FIRST program. The significance of the proposed work is that careful implementation of the Faculty Development Core activities will not only increase the likelihood of the UNM FIRST cohort to secure extramural R01 or equivalent NIH funding and achieve professional legitimacy in their fields but will also impact all future diverse faculty hires at UNM. Importantly, supporting faculty development of a diverse workforce in a majority-minority state and Hispanic Serving Institution will subsequently provide a pipeline for increasing the diversity of the biomedical workforce by offering diverse faculty representation as role models for female and historically underrepresented trainees. UNM will be the home of diverse faculty who will attain professional legitimacy while building careers they love in a welcoming scientific community where they belong, feel valued, and contribute to ongoing institutional efforts to change the culture at UNM to promote inclus...