National Research Mentoring Network (NRMN) Coordination Center Supplement

7. Project Summary/Abstract: A key component of a successful, competitive workforce is diversity. Across fields, including the sciences, diversity has been linked to higher levels of problem-solving, innovation, and creativity, decision-making, and quality of work (1-4). The National Research Mentoring Network (NRMN) Phase II initiative (2019-2024), part of the broader Diversity Program Consortium (DPC), is one such effort that seeks to assess the efficacy of mentorship education and career development interventions across 11 U01 research projects. Understanding factors that significantly contribute to career persistence, success, and progression of groups over time requires more than just cross-sectional data across individual interventions. Specifically, it requires data from large, diverse groups over extended periods of time with different experiences and varied degrees of engagement in targeted interventions. To realize the potential in these data, the efforts of participant consent language, measurement alignment, data collection, data aggregation, and dissemination need to be coordinated. When implemented effectively, a coordinated approach provides the opportunity to study individual research projects collectively as one larger study and therefore recognize trends longitudinally and at scale otherwise not possible. NRMN Phase II, and its use of a coordination center to collect common measures data, provided an opportunity to engage in this interrelated work. The COVID-19 pandemic significantly impacted the NRMN community including its 11 U01 research studies, the NRMN Resource Center (RC), and therefore, the NRMN Coordination Center (CC). In response, the NRMN CC altered its plan of work within the scope of its aims and was able to support the community in exciting but unanticipated ways. The NRMN CC now finds itself in the position of needing to increase its capacity in the final 15 months of the grant period to accommodate changes to the timelines for participant recruitment and enrollment, implementation of interventions, and data collection, as well as the size and scope of those data. The proposed work responds to the remaining NRMN community needs arising from COVID-19 while maximizing the collective impact of NRMN Phase II. Funding for this work will support completion of the Specific Aims, despite the delayed timelines due to COVID-19, adding the additional personnel and resources required to effectively collect, store, track and report NRMN Phase II data from research studies whose timelines were affected by the pandemic. This supplement will also provide support for the infrastructure and expertise needed to capitalize on the common data collected, develop sustainable tools for the dissemination of NRMN Phase II products and findings, and study NRMN's collective impact.