60 - A Community-Engaged Transdisciplinary Oral Health Research Core: Growing Pains and Fulfilling Experiences

Description: The Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) Institute for Inclusion, Inquiry, and Innovation (iCubed) was created to extend VCU’s long-standing commitment to community-engaged research. It develops transdisciplinary cores of faculty, students, and community members to address needs with an emphasis on social justice and community engagement. The Oral Health Core was established in 2017 to identify and mitigate psychological, social, contextual, and resource barriers to oral health equity in the Richmond region. The Core’s activities to achieve this mission span five domains: research, teaching/mentorship, faculty recruitment, transdisciplinary collaboration, and service/community engagement. Oral Health Core members have recruited four new tenure-track faculty to VCU, mentored 24 students, 12 existing faculty who are active core members, and 20+ community leaders engaged in individual and collaborative research projects. These cross-school and community-academic collaborations have resulted in funded research at local and national levels. iCubed provides support for campus symposia and faculty development. It promotes collaboration and supports grant activities with pilot funding for developing a digital badging curriculum. While transdisciplinary collaborations can offer intellectual fulfillment and practical support, they can also inhere “growing pains,” for example variability in units' support and expectations of iCubed faculty; recruitment of newly promoted and tenured faculty by competing institutions; and challenges in balancing the focus of oral health with independent and core research, teaching, and service agendas. Join us for this opportunity to publicly self-reflect, and identify lessons that we may integrate into our work and that other future transdisciplinary community-engaged research cores may consider in their own work.

Source of Funding:: VCU’s iCubed Transdisciplinary Program
Oral Health Equity Core: Office of the Provost and Institutional Equity, Effectiveness and Success
VCU Presidential Research Quest Fund