PROJECT SUMMARY – RESEARCH EDUCATION COMPONENT The newly configured Research Education Component will substantially enhance existing research education programs on aging, AD and related disorders. Its overall goal will be to optimize the training of a workforce to meet the nation’s biomedical, behavioral and clinical needs in AD-related research. It will support research and mentoring experiences that promote the development of future leaders who can improve clinical interventions by integrating clinical insights with knowledge of basic sciences. In keeping with the overall theme of our ADC, the research education program will emphasize the heterogeneity of brain aging and dementia so that the basic scientists are exposed to the complexity of the clinical presentations while the clinicians appreciate the heterogeneity of the underlying biological phenomena. The REC will be led by Marsel Mesulam (ADC Director and Head of a Clinical Training Program in Behavioral Neurology & Neuropsychiatry) and Darby Morhardt (Leader of the Outreach and Education Core), and will be staffed by senior faculty of the ADC. It will be leveraged by the extensive infrastructure of the Northwestern Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute (NUCATS) for Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR) programs, and by the Northwestern University Graduate School and the McGaw Medical Center of Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine for diversity recruitment. The new Core will have a broad mandate that will interact with the activities of all other ADC components and will enhance the education of doctoral candidates, post- doctoral fellows and faculty through innovative multidisciplinary mechanisms designed to bridge the gap between clinical and basic research experience in the areas of aging, AD and related disorders. The REC will also provide personalized mentoring suited to the background and career aspiration of individual research trainees through programs that include formal instruction on the Responsible Conduct of Research.