Dissemination Core - Roberts

Dissemination Core Abstract The goals of the Dissemination Core are to educate higher risk young people about alcohol use disorder while also tackling health disparities by increasing representation of minorities in biomedical science. To achieve these goals, we will create a virtual internship program targeted toward high school students from health disparity populations (these populations are also under-represented in STEM fields, i.e. URM) and expand our in-person internship opportunities, increase post-doctoral trainee involvement in outreach and better utilize social media to highlight both our scientific accomplishments and outreach efforts, and create an Alcohol Research Center (ARC) & NIAAA Training Grant (T32) trainee and intern diversity-related club and annual poster session. Our virtual internship program will serve to educate our interns on the neuroscience of alcohol use, abuse and dependence using ARC laboratory examples and empower them to pursue scientific careers by encouraging their sense of identity and belonging, by promoting agency and leadership, and by educating them about career pathways. In-person interns will be encouraged to participate in these lessons and discussions. ARC and T32 post-doctoral trainees will lecture and mentor within the virtual internship program, give lectures to high school and undergraduate students, present in university community center settings, and contribute to our social media. Our ARC Diversity group and end-of-summer poster sessions will allow the interns to learn about each other’s work, practice presenting science, interact with each other, and connect with our trainees and investigators to foster mentee/mentor relationships. Health disparities are extremely problematic and addressing them represents a key goal of NIAAA. This core has the goal of targeting URM in STEM research both for education regarding health disparities as well as to increase their representation in biomedical science and medicine. This will be a valuable resource for ARC labs as it will help recruit URM into our labs. It has been shown that diversity enhances problem solving and innovation as well as increasing publication impact and citations.