The Capacity Building Core, which is part of JCOIN’s Coordination and Translation Center (CTC), has launched the Learning Experiences to Advance Practice (LEAP) education program to support investigators and scholars with training and knowledge to conduct research and build research capacity within criminal legal and health settings.

The LEAP program is a 1-2 year pilot education program that aims to advance the capacity and diversity of high impact research for populations involved with the health and criminal legal systems through specialized training and skill-development curriculums. Specifically, the goals of the program are to:

1. Grow the research workforce with the knowledge and skills needed to conduct ethical, rigorous research including partnering with criminal legal and health agencies to conduct rigorous studies, recruitment and enrollment of subjects, use of informed consents, and problem solving in a variety of health, community, and criminal legal settings.
2. Enlist an array of community, health, and criminal legal leaders to value and implement research findings in practice and to engage in collaborative research teams on the conduct of research.
3. Motivate these learners to champion completion of research projects and fidelity of planned projects given the challenges of day-to-day operations.
4. Expand and/or develop a pipeline of independent criminal legal and health researchers for the field that can work in multidisciplinary teams.

LEAP Program Tracks:

LEAP Investigator Track: The Investigator track is designed for individuals interested in a career as an independent investigator and will focus on an experiential project to be carried out over 12 months. This may be a grant writing, research, or publishing project of your choosing or LEAP can coordinate your working with current JCOIN investigators on a project. This track will emphasize research proposal writing, grant management, mentorship, and advanced research skills needed to be successful as an independent investigator for projects within the criminal legal and/or health fields.

LEAP Scholar Track: The Scholar track will support clinicians, researchers, lab/policy staff, and analysts interested in collaborating on research in criminal legal/health settings. The Scholar program focuses on partnering with researchers, formulating research questions, understanding elements of research design, ethical issues concerning research, and collaborator roles to ground and translate the conduct of research in criminal legal and/or health settings.