Development Core

PROJECT SUMMARY The Development Core has, as its primary mission, the development, support, and promotion of population research of the highest scientific merit, in line with our four Primary Research Areas: Gender, Family and Social Change, Health in Social Context, Social and Economic Inequality, and Migration and Immigrant Processes. The Core’s mission is accomplished through: 1) promoting active inter-disciplinary engagement in population research through seminars, workshops and other collaborative opportunities including with the Federal statistics agencies and larger metropolitan Washington DC community; 2) supporting our faculty, in particular junior and underrepresented minority (URM) faculty, to develop, expand, and consolidate their research agenda in the population sciences through Seed Grants; 3) hosting resident and visiting population scientists in order to support and expand collaborative research opportunities for MPRC faculty associates and extending outreach of intellectual resources to our External Affiliates, particularly those at institutions without a Population Dynamics Center (P2C); 4) fostering the careers of underrepresented scholars in population research in order to foster inclusive and broadened perspectives in population research; and 5) co-sponsoring symposia and workshops on a range of population related issues in order to increase our visibility in and outside of UMD and strengthen our interdisciplinary mission. The seminar series and workshops offer invaluable opportunities for the UMD community to engage with cutting edge theoretical and empirical advances in population research and to develop fruitful collaborations outside of UMD. The Seed Grant program is fundamental to supporting our faculty, especially junior faculty and URM faculty, to develop proposals for submission to NICHD’s Population Dynamics Branch (PDB) and for proposals in the PDB mission submitted to other federal agencies and foundations. It is a dynamic program, adapting to special opportunities for high-impact research, such as those occasioned by the COVID-19 pandemic or sudden restrictions on reproductive health access. The resident and visiting researcher programs are critical to increasing the visibility of MPRC nationally, internationally and the greater Washington DC community. Our outreach to External Affiliates, particularly at non-P2C institutions, enriches population research at MPRC and provides vital networks to access intellectual resources for our External Affiliates. The Development Core’s programs to support URM scholars integrate diversity throughout all of our activities, including seminar and workshops, mentoring, seed grants and resident and visiting scholars programs, thereby addressing the call by NICHD-PDB and other federal funding agencies to increase the visibility of URM researchers in population research. Finally, co-sponsoring symposia is a highly effective way to interact with other entities at UMD and to further elevate the role of MPRC in promoting inter-disciplinary population research at and outside of UMD.