Maryland Population Research Center

PROJECT SUMMARY This application requests a fifth cycle of five-year NICHD Population Research Infrastructure Program support to the Maryland Population Research Center (MPRC) at the University of Maryland (UMD). The MPRC is an interdisciplinary center at the University of Maryland, College Park that supports the research of 84 population researchers across 5 different schools or colleges and 16 departments or units. Over the next five-year period, MPRC will support population research in the Primary Research Areas of Gender, Family, and Social Change, Social and Economic Inequality, Health in Social Context, and Migration and Immigrant Processes, and will support innovations in data and methods for population research across these substantive areas. This support will be provided by three cores that are central to increasing the pace and impact of population science research: Administrative, Development, and Scientific and Technical. These cores will provide research infrastructure for population scientists, foster a vibrant, interdisciplinary intellectual environment, and promote the development of junior and underrepresented minority scholars in population research. The cores will also each provide resources to population researchers in institutions without Population Dynamics Center (P2C) funding. The Admin core will support the preparation of grant applications, post-award project management, and will provide services for other cores. The Admin core will deploy web-based tools to enhance Center activities and will provide scholars effective means of managing research collaborations and disseminating research. The Development Core will promote the intellectual community of population research at UMD through seed grant programs, by organizing a weekly seminar series, workshops on focused topics, and by organizing and co-sponsoring conferences and symposia. The Core also supports resident population scientist and visiting population scientist programs that provide options of both a physical and a virtual home for population researchers whose research productivity may be enhanced by the infrastructural and intellectual resources of MPRC and UMD. Taking advantage of our location in the Washington, DC area, MPRC will promote the research of our associates through engaging with the research and data activities of federal agencies in the Washington, D.C., including through support to biennial workshops and conferences on time use research using the American Time Use Survey and its international counterpart surveys. The Scientific and Technical Core will manage the Center’s computing resources, and provide confidential, secure-data access, both in-house and through facilitating and promoting access to campus-wide secure-data computing infrastructure. It will also provide statistical computing short courses and consulting to support empirically- focused population research.