Description/Overview: The clarion call to transform nursing education presents immense challenges and opportunities for schools of nursing across the U.S and around the world. Confronted by severe faculty shortages, inadequate clinical placement opportunities, and outdated pedagogies, nursing education must be transformed to abate current challenges and to prepare a nursing workforce that meets the size and competencies required by evolving health care systems. To this end, academic nursing must design, implement, test, and disseminate new structures and strategies. Unfortunately, the science of nursing education remains in its infancy. The small body of research that exists is constrained by insufficient funding, which has contributed to small-sample, single-site studies, inadequately developed and tested outcome measures, and limited analysis techniques. To develop the database and research capacity to generate sound evidence for guiding the transformation of academic nursing, a collaborative Nursing Education Research Network is needed. The Network will provide an efficient mechanism for collecting annual data from schools, faculty and students that can be analyzed by Network staff and made available to Network members for their own analyses via a secure Web portal. Although member schools will determine the most crucial research problems to be explored, this Network will have the potential to employ powerful longitudinal designs to investigate important curricular, instructional, and policy-related questions over time. This symposium will be interactive, with discussion aimed at identifying participants’ most critical data and training needs, and to explore how evidence, collected via the Network, can inform current transformation efforts. In addition, exemplar research questions, data points, and dissemination strategies will be explored and progress-to-date in planning the Nursing Education Research Network will be described.