Abstract The University of Iowa Holden Comprehensive Cancer Center (HCCC) is an NCI-funded comprehensive cancer center with a strong culture of transdisciplinary collaboration. It is the only academic cancer center in the state of Iowa and serves a rural population with unique environmental exposures. The Population Research Core is a HCCC shared resource that provides centralized leadership for harnessing clinical and population-based tools and data resources, eliminating barriers to their use. Led by its Director, Dr. Bradley McDowell, the Core provides epidemiology expertise, study design, enhanced data sharing, and distributed prep-to-research queries that promote rigorous retrospective and prospective studies using robust data collection and data curation methods. Dr. McDowell's expertise in these areas is particularly important as we apply big data approaches that integrate social, population, clinical, patient-generated, and molecular data to generate evidence to personalize cancer care. The ultimate goal is to provide researchers with a complete picture of cancer patients' experiences prior to diagnosis, during treatment, and through long-term survival. This will be accomplished by integrating existing hospital data with state cancer-registry data, insurance claims, and other cancer-related datasets to create a multi-purpose data mart that will serve as a resource for standardized data queries. This work will be performed while continuing to oversee a mature support core for population science activities of the HCCC.