Administrative Core

The Administrative (Admin) Core of the Penn INSPIRE Center leads senior and emerging investigators in establishing, implementing, and evaluating a cutting-edge, interdisciplinary scientific agenda that leverages implementation science to optimize suicide prevention for underserved populations. INSPIRE integrates perspectives from psychology, implementation science, psychiatry, machine learning, health economics, and health information technology. Realizing the benefit of such a rich, interdisciplinary research endeavor requires strong and creative centralized leadership as well as efficient and effective coordination of services, logistics, and resources. Led by Center Co-Directors, Drs. Gregory Brown and Maria Oquendo, the Admin Core is INSPIRE’s organizational, governance, and strategic-planning hub and addresses three Aims.

First, the Core provides scientific and programmatic leadership to maximize integration, rigor, and synergy across Center components, investigators, and external affiliates. It institutes and coordinates an internal Center Steering Committee, a Stakeholder Committee, and an External Advisory Committee for transparency and input on governance, planning, and evaluation. Second, the Admin Core ensures scientific innovation and responsiveness to evolving research, practice, and policy needs through the INSPIRE Pilot Studies Program. The Core also runs the INSPIRE Suicide Prevention Scholars Program to engage and build capacity of both early-stage and established investigators who can make novel interdisciplinary contributions to the suicide prevention research evidence base. Third, the Admin Core amplifies the impact of our research and makes INSPIRE resources available across scientific, practice, and policy communities through targeted mechanisms for wide, multi-sector dissemination of Center findings, research tools, and other products. Thus, through the Admin Core, INSPIRE Leadership maximizes generation of high-impact knowledge about suicide prevention strategies designed to be rapidly deployable in a wide range of settings serving the most vulnerable, and often disenfranchised, populations. The Core’s management strategy emphasizes shared leadership, investigator support and mentoring, and intensive engagement of stakeholders at every level (planning, evaluation, research, and dissemination) to maximize impact.