SUPPORTING RESEARCH ON INTEGRATIVE MECHANISMS OF RESILIENCE ACROSS TIME AND SCALE

There is a general understanding across the public and among academic researchers that resilience describes the ability of an individual, group, or institution to experience adversities and challenges and to persevere or to recover over time. In some academic literature, resilience can be operationalized as a trait while in other literature, resilience is more a process that can occur innately over time; be restored, or built in advance through learning, for example. In 2016, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) issued a one-time funding opportunity to fund cooperative projects to build integrative scientific frameworks to illuminate the processes and mechanisms involved with resilience that subsequently could be used across research disciplines and in contexts of health, illness, recovery, and overall well-being. This introduction describes the perspectives that informed the original funding opportunity, the original funded projects, and some collaborative activities between NIH scientists and the grantees.