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.

公众和学术研究人员普遍认为，复原力描述了个人、团体或机构经历逆境和挑战以及坚持或恢复的能力。在一些学术文献中，韧性可以作为一种特征进行操作，而在其他文献中，韧性更像是一个可以随着时间自然发生的过程；例如，可以通过学习来恢复或预先构建。2016 年，美国国立卫生研究院 (NIH) 发布了一次性资助机会，为合作项目提供资金，以建立综合科学框架，以阐明与复原力相关的过程和机制，这些过程和机制随后可用于跨研究学科和健康背景，疾病、康复和整体健康。本介绍描述了为原始资助机会、原始资助项目以及 NIH 科学家与受助者之间的一些合作活动提供信息的观点。