PROJECT SUMMARY Systemic racism, lack of access to healthcare, implicit bias in care provided, and other injustices have contributed to reprehensible healthcare disparities in minoritized communities, resulting in preventable morbidity and mortality in older minoritized adults. Addressing disparities in health and healthcare for minoritized older adults requires innovation in aging research at the nexus of geriatric medicine, gerontology, and palliative care research. Community Based Participatory Research (CBPR) is an important and promising strategy to meet this challenge because it has been shown to reduce health disparities, reduce distrust, and result in positive health outcomes. The goal of this K07 Academic Career Leadership Award is to leverage the applicant’s national leadership in health equity and CBPR to create a sustainable training, mentoring, an incubator program in CBPR that will result in a path towards health equity. The overarching objective is to build a cadre of geriatrics, gerontology and palliative care researchers, clinicians, and administrators across the US with the necessary skills to harness the power and promise of CBPR in fostering impactful and sustained conduct healthcare system change for minoritized older adults. To accomplish this, the applicant proposes the following Specific Aims: (1) Build a national CBPR training program focusing on health equity in older populations; (2) Measure program outcomes, and (3) Develop a program sustainability plan. The applicant is a senior investigator, program innovator, and leading national expert in designing and executing rigorous, federally-funded, CBPR research to improve care for older, minoritized, adults with serious illness and (b) Training and mentoring healthcare professionals in aging and palliative care research that is visioned, designed, executed, and disseminated in equal, bidirectional partnership with local communities. Her long-term career goal is to make a broad-reaching and sustainable impact on the approach to addressing health equity in aging and end-of-life research for minoritized older adults by establishing a nationally-available CBPR training center for aging research. To achieve these goals, she has designed a training and skills development program that includes a focus on 5 key areas: (1) Curriculum development for adult learners; (2) Institutional Change leadership skills; (3) Mentorship of under-represented persons in healthcare; (4) Implementation science, and (5) Further expertise in aging focused research. The creation of an impactful and sustainable CBPR training program for aging research and clinical professionals promises to change the state of research and implementable solutions to address health disparities across the US. This equitable academic-community partnership approach promises to overcome barriers of trust, catalyze development of local culturally appropriate interventions, and ultimately change approaches to disparities in aging care for varied populations of older, minoritized adults across the US.

PROJECT NARRATIVE Addressing disparities in health and healthcare for minoritized older adults requires innovation in aging research at the nexus of geriatric medicine, gerontology, and palliative care research. Community Based Participatory Research (CBPR) is an important and promising strategy to meet this challenge because it has been shown to reduce health disparities, decrease distrust in healthcare system, and result in positive health outcomes. To accomplish the goal of leveraging the candidate’s leadership in health equity and CBPR to create a training program in CBPR that will result in a path towards health equity for older adults, the candidate will (1) Build a national CBPR training program focusing on health equity in older populations; (2) Measure program outcomes, and (3) Develop a program sustainability plan.