PROJECT SUMMARY Cardiovascular disease remains the number one cause of death in the United States. The efficient development of future novel diagnostics and therapies to identify and treat cardiovascular disease will require highly collaborative and multi-disciplinary teams consisting of the best basic, translational and clinical investigators. We have a highly collaborative and multi-disciplinary scientific infrastructure that has been created to support translational cardiovascular research, education, and training. The mentors on this T32 application are all established scientists in their field, have a passion for training, and recognize two unmet needs that will ultimately be required to optimally train and retain the next generation of the best cardiovascular investigators. First, it will be essential for cardiovascular researchers to possess multi-disciplinary skills and work in highly inter-disciplinary, collaborative and translational teams to efficiently move knowledge from the bench to the bedside, to the community and back. Second, in order to obtain optimal productivity towards improving cardiovascular health of the population, it is essential to utilize the contributions from the best of the entire scientific workforce. At The Ohio State University, our goal is to become a model 1) for impactful, collaborative and translational cardiovascular research and 2) for establishing future women scientific leaders to expand the quality of our best investigators. Our proposed T32 will address these goals during the predoctoral period when training towards these goals is most impactful. This Predoctoral T32 Program therefore has 2 goals: 1. To provide multi-faceted cardiovascular research training to work in collaborative, multidisciplinary teams that will facilitate efficient translation of scientific findings to improve human health. 2. To provide training for the advancement of women to all trainees, improve the culture for women to succeed, and advance the retention of women in independent scientific careers in cardiovascular research thus enhancing the numbers of quality researchers and leaders.