Rural Drug Addiction Research Center
About The Center
Our Leadership Team includes our Center Director (Dr. Rick Bevins) and two Associate Directors, (Dr. Timothy Nelson and Dr. Shilpa Buch) who have a proven record in overseeing large centers, mentoring early-stage investigators, pursuing new research opportunities, and achieving a collaborative vision of interdisciplinary research.
Our Administrative Core organizes and leads our efforts, working to enhance the success of Center faculty and contribute to the overall scientific and research environment at University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) and to the collaborative success of our IDeA-program partner institutions in Nebraska and beyond.
Our Project Leaders develop and direct individual research projects within the Center. These early-stage investigators come from a range of academic disciplines and pursue research that ranges from synapse to society. As Project Leaders achieve funding success and graduate to independence, new Project Leaders are selected to take their place.
Our Internal Mentoring, Engagement, and Outreach Workgroup (formerly the Internal Mentoring and Advisory Committee) is made up of fifteen established investigators from relevant department, colleges, and centers with expertise in RDAR’s programmatic focus. This group assists the Center Leadership in reviewing Project Leader progress, improving faculty mentoring activities, and pursuing synergistic opportunities for Center collaborations.
Our Longitudinal Networks Core offers unique resources and expertise including secondary data on regional substance use, access to a Participant Pool of research participants from which to collect primary data, various software to collect responsive fine-grained mobile Health data, consultation in network sampling, analytic approaches, community-engaged research, field-based biospecimen testing, epidemiological data collection, intervention design, and research with hard-to-access populations.
Our External Advisory Committee monitors Center progress across all domains to ensure that the Center is meeting long and short-term goals toward effectiveness and sustainability.