PROJECT SUMMARY: Pilot Core The Pilot Core of the proposed P50 supports the vitality of the Center by facilitating investigator development and promoting new research insights and priorities for the Center’s research studies. This program will provide a funding mechanism for pilot project applications from early career investigators (ECIs) and from established investigators seeking to extend their research into assessment of neural and inflammatory mediators of drug use and cardiometabolic health. Investigators can access seed grant funding and Center resources to (a) assess the feasibility of exploring a new research question, (b) apply a new approach, or (c) use existing methodology to explore a novel way to advance a new area of scientific exploration. The seed grant program also will provide resources to support secondary data analysis of CTAPS datasets from concluded and ongoing projects. These datasets were collected through both longitudinal, observational research and randomized prevention trials. Our datasets will permit replication of findings, comparison of models for different age groups (e.g., adolescents versus young adults), and aggregation of variables across data sets (harmonization) to maximize sample size or the age span to be evaluated. In addition to the investigator career development that occurs via seed grant funding, we propose to implement a targeted mentoring program for ECIs. Although not limited to minority or African American ECIs, an expressed goal of this program is to recruit early-career scientists from underrepresented backgrounds at UGA and our P50 partner, Northwestern University (NWU). This program is informed by CTAPS investigators’ experience with mentoring in the P30, a history of systematic mentoring for junior faculty, mentoring via diversity supplements, and implementing an Institutional Research Training Grant. To initiate the Year 1 (Y1) pilot project and mentoring system, we designed a unique pilot that will serve as a collaborative training experience for the Y1 mentoring cohort and advance the scientific aims of the Center. This experience centers around a secondary data analysis of fMRI, inflammation, and psychosocial data collected during the past CTAPS P30 grant period. The training cohort will work with this unique, rich data set under the guidance of Dr. Brody, the Center Director, with methodological and substantive support from P50 scientists and statisticians. The aims of our Pilot Core are to: (1) administer a seed grant program designed to support pilot projects that address African Americans’ drug use and cardiometabolic vulnerabilities; (2) provide targeted mentoring to early-career investigators, particularly those from underrepresented groups; and (3) implement a unique Year 1 pilot project/training experience: “Racial discrimination, protective processes, and drug use among African Americans: The role of NIN mechanisms.”