DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Overall Component The overarching theme of the Nutrition Obesity Research Center (NORC) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is Trans-Disciplinary Nutrition Research: From Molecules to Public Health. The NORC adapts and translates expertise in community/population-based and clinical studies to facilitate the transfer of ideas and information to the laboratory, while at the same time helping to translate ideas from the laboratory into new hypotheses for studies at the clinical and community level. We propose an Administrative Core and five Scientific Cores: Diet and Physical Activity in Human Populations (DPAC), Communication for Health Applications and Interventions (CHAI), Metabolic Molecular Phenotyping (MMP) and Animal Metabolism Phenotyping (AMP), all of which are ongoing successful cores already providing exceptional services to NORC members. The Nutrigenetics Core (NGx) is a new developmental core that will get seed funding to develop services that will help public health and other researchers access nutrigenetics methods for use in their research. Our record of success during the last funding period is substantial. NORC activities have resulted in significant increases in the number and productivity of nutrition and obesity investigators at UNC, the funding for nutrition and obesity research, and the understanding of the importance of nutrition and obesity among researchers, clinicians, and the general public. The NORC has 130 member scientists from 36 different departments and divisions of UNC. They have exceptional research funding, having been awarded $179.8 million in nutrition and obesity grants during the last five years ($40.6 million in 2015 alone (first quarter)). Of this total, 91% of the funding was from federal grants ($163.3 million, NIH, USDA, CDC, DOD) with $41.7 million from the NIDDK. Our research base members have an exceptional publication record; with 859 peer- reviewed publications that are directly related to the support they received from the NORC.