Examples of NIGMS-Funded NRSA Training Programs with Notable Records of Recruitment and Retention of Underrepresented Minority Students

• Aggressive recruiting both locally and nationally.
• Involvement of faculty and students in recruitment and orientation activities.
• Consistent presence at the Annual Biomedical Research Conference for Minority Students (ABRCMS), the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science (SACNAS), and the California Diversity Forum.
• Targeted recruiting visits by faculty and student alumni to individual campuses with high minority enrollment.
• De-emphasis of standardized test scores in admissions decisions.
• Individualized curriculum and regularly scheduled personalized academic advising in first year.
• "Critical Mass" that enables formation of a student organization.

• BME aggressively communicates and invites qualified URM applicants to visit Boston University and to meet separately with other URM in the BME and QBP program during their visit, in addition to any other group itinerary that may be planned.
• BME works with BU organizations such as the Minority Engineers Society, Society of Hispanic Engineers, and Society of Women Engineers to recruit at career/graduate school fairs at several national conferences, including the National Society of Black Engineers, Society of Women Engineers, Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers, and National Women of Color in Science and Technology.
• BME participates in the Excellence Through Diversity Program sponsored by the New England Board of Higher Education (NEBHE). NEBHE hosts a Science Network Conference annually that addresses the unique needs and concerns of secondary, undergraduate, and graduate students living in New England who are underrepresented in the fields of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM).
• Boston University participates in the Northeastern Alliance, which encourages the exchange of students among participating institutions on the East Coast.
• Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowships (SURF), sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the Northeast Alliance for Graduate Education, are offered to promote access to graduate education, especially among underrepresented minority undergraduates. These fellowships are open to BU and non-BU students in support of research projects supervised by Boston University faculty in engineering, math, computer science, biology, chemistry, and physics. We target those students who are enrolled in the program by having training grant faculty give presentations in their ongoing seminar series.

GDBBS Activities

• Attendance at the Atlanta University Center Graduate School Fair. Atlanta University Center is composed of several minority institutions, including Clark Atlanta University, Morehouse College, Morris Brown College and Spelman College.
• Attendance at the McNair Research Conference.
• Attendance at SACNAS and ABRCMS. In November 2005 the ABRCMS conference was held in Atlanta and the Division offered tours that included a welcome by distinguished alumni Dr. James Gavin and the Acting Director of the Division, Dr. Keith Wilkinson, visits to several labs with laboratory demonstrations by current students, and faculty research presentations.
• One of our current graduate students was invited to speak to students in the Oakwood Biomedical Association in Huntsville, AL.
• GDDBS has continued to support the collaborative academic/research relationship with the MARC Program at Grambling State University. One of our faculty members attends their Annual Research Symposium.
• Provides support for five students to attend the SURE Program at Emory (Summer Undergraduate Research Experience). Specific attention is paid to matching applicants who contacted us at the ABRCMS with a Graduate Division faculty member.
• For the past several years the Division has hosted visits by Alabama State University to campus. Students learned about the Division, participated in laboratory tours with graduate student guides, and heard three current graduate students discuss their research. One of our current students also visited the university, which is her alma mater, to provide information about Division Programs.
• Letters, posters and brochures announcing Division Programs were mailed to science departments at all Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and Predominantly Minority Institutions (PMIs), and to MARC Directors.
• A Postbaccalaureate Research Experience Program grant from NIH was funded September 1, 2002. The program is named PROMISE and we hope to attract a number of these promising students to stay at Emory for their formal research training.
• The Division works closely with Dr. Karama Neal, the Coordinator of the FACES Program (Facilitating Academic Careers in Engineering and Science) at Emory. Each year FACES provides five fellowships to minority students who are entering the professoriate.

BCDB Program Activities

• As members of the GDBBS, BCDB faculty participate in many of the above activities. In addition, BCDB faculty:
  - attend the annual NIH MARC Conferences.
  - present seminars at minority colleges and universities.
  - provide all URM applicants with information about minority activities and opportunities at Emory University.
• To recruit the top URM applicants to the BCDB program, they are nominated for highly competitive fellowships at Emory, including:
  - the Emory Graduate Diversity Fellowship
  - Facilitating Academic Careers in Engineering and Science (FACES)
  - the GDBBS Division Scholar Awards.

Recruitment:

• The most important point is that our program is explicitly committed to training URM students, including disabled students.
• Word of mouth. We have a track record of training URM for more than 35 years.
• Faculty participation at SACNAS and ABRCMS conferences.
• Summer Undergraduate Research Experience Programs.
• A group of our current students have created an organization, MInDS, Mentoring to Inspire Diversity in Science. This group helps to recruit a diverse student body by communicating to prospective students the kinds of support available. On May 2, 2006 this group won a Diversity Leadership Award from the University.

Retention:

• Bonding of incoming URM students with entire incoming class.
• Tutoring.
• Appointment of a faculty member as liaison with URM students. Our MInDS group mentors new students in areas such as presenting rotation talks, choosing thesis advisors, and coursework.

The graduate training program in Cellular and Molecular Medicine (CMM) accepted its first class of four students in the academic year 1993-94. Since then, it has grown in size and popularity as evidenced by the increase in our application numbers and in particular, the increase in URM's applying and matriculating into the program.

From 2000-2005, an average of 21% of students joining our program belong to an underrepresented minority group (range 11-28%).

• We emphasize the medical and disease relevance of our curriculum and research opportunities.
• Program faculty, staff and students attend national recruitment meetings (e.g., ABRCMS, SACNAS) and follow-up with individual students in order to maintain and enhance their interest in our program for graduate school.
• Our students help significantly with the admissions effort every year. Word of mouth among students exerts an important influence towards choosing a graduate school and program.
• Our program is popular with students pursuing combined M.D/Ph.D. degrees at our institution. Such students represent another source of "diversity", in this case professional. We find that emphasizing diversity in a multidimensional fashion makes a graduate program more attractive to all students.

URM in Most Recent
Entering Class:

There has been an increase in the recruitment and retention of URM, and this is due mainly to our collaboration with the S.U.N.Y.

Alliance for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP) led by Stony Brook University with SUNY Albany, Binghamton, and Buffalo as partners. The national AGEP initiative was created by Congress with the primary aim of increasing the number of URM (i.e., African Americans, Hispanics, American Indians, Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians or other Pacific Islanders) receiving doctoral degrees in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. Dr. David Ferguson, winner of the prestigious White House Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring (PAESMEM), is the Project Director of the AGEP NSF-funded grant.

Additionally, the establishment of Turner Fellowships provides URM students with the equivalent of a TA line and a full tuition scholarship for five continuous years. Award of this fellowship provides students with a 10% supplement to their total stipend. The prestigious nature of the fellowships helps us to compete with other institutions for the students. The funding for the Turner Fellowship Program derives from the NY State budget and represents part of the institutional commitment to minority education. An additional benefit of the Turner Fellowship Program is the opportunity for Fellows to meet for brown-bag lunches and for other social gatherings to provide a peer support group. In addition a Turner Dissertation Fellowship award exists. This is a one-time academic year fellowship award for students from underrepresented ethnic minority groups who must be advanced to candidacy in a Stony Brook doctoral degree program.

Recruitment:

• Establishment of a Summer Research Institute (SRI). This is a competitive application-based residential internship where students are funded to conduct research for 10 weeks under the mentorship of a faculty mentor. Pharmacology faculty have consistently served as mentors for SRI interns. Stony Brook AGEP hosts an SRI annually, training 75 undergraduate minority interns from 1999-2004. Furthermore, the AGEP Summer Bridge Program, which funds incoming students to start enhanced training or classes the summer before matriculation in graduate school, enables a smoother transition into our rigorous doctoral curriculum.
• The Stony Brook AGEP program hosts a national conference called A Gathering of Science Scholars which features a comprehensive experience to expose undergraduate students to Graduate School opportunities and careers in research and teaching and provide important skills and resources.
• Annual appearances at major national diversity conferences such as SACNAS, ABRCMS, NSBE, SHPE, NYS CSTEP, and McNair, which have proven to be key feeder opportunities and has also raised the visibility of our university in other geographic parts of the country.
• Stony Brook AGEP organizes interdisciplinary and targeted recruitment at our Manhattan site (with both faculty and student participants).
• Stony Brook hosts a yearly retreat for local four-year colleges and master's-only institutions where a select group of undergraduate and master's students spend two full days at Stony Brook interacting with faculty and graduate students, discussing research interests, visiting labs, and learning about different study and career opportunities.
• Direct mail lists. The training program currently has a database of some 400 addresses of undergraduate departments and student advisors that receive regular mailings of information relating to the program. We send program flyers to individuals on mailing lists provided by ASPET (American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics). Additional direct mailings to MARC (Minority Access to Research Careers) and MBRS (Minority Biomedical Research Support) advisors and trainees is described below.
• Visiting Speakers Program. We have instituted a Visiting Speakers Program. We have assembled a PowerPoint presentation that outlines the research opportunities as well as information on the campus and community, Program faculty travel to undergraduate campuses to deliver this presentation to undergraduate audiences. These lectures have been delivered to organized courses and to college "Biochemistry Clubs." The costs of travel to these locations is borne by the Department of Pharmacology and subsidized by AGEP. In addition, we have program faculty members make an effort to meet with undergraduates and to explain the training program when they travel to present research seminars.
• Contacts with former advisors of program students. We maintain a database of faculty members at undergraduate institutions who have been identified by our current students as advisors that helped them select Stony Brook. This enables us to send personalized notes to these individuals to keep them informed of the progress of their former advisees and to remind them that we would appreciate their efforts to bring our program to the attention of other prospective students. In our experience, cultivating such personal contacts is more effective than general direct mailing lists.
• Undergraduate pharmacology majors. The development of undergraduate majors in Pharmacology, both at Stony Brook and elsewhere, helps to bring graduate education in Pharmacology to the attention of undergraduates. The graduates of our undergraduate program constitute a very well qualified group, recruited by other Pharmacology programs, as they have both the academic background and the research experience to distinguish themselves in graduate school.
• Thorough follow-up of requests for application materials.
  
  

• Assigning both a faculty advisor and a senior student mentor to each incoming student.
• Early tutoring options for students who need it, or anticipate needing it, for the mandatory first year courses.
• Frequent meetings between students and program director and coordinator.
• Organizing social events to bring together incoming students with all students.

• Expanded outreach programs to provide research opportunities for undergraduates at UCLA and elsewhere, including campuses of the California State University system and the community college system. These programs, including major programs funded by Bridges to the Future awards and MARC grants, have had a multitude of beneficial effects:
  • made students aware of the wide array of biomedical research at UCLA;
  • kept students on a research track by allowing them to work as apprentice scientists rather than in more typical undergraduate jobs; and,
  • provided a "minority-friendly" environment where students to be recruited could see the number of students from URM groups already working in the research laboratories.
• Encouraged "minority-friendly" environments in the participating research laboratories by encouraging trainees to mentor URM undergraduates in their own research projects. We ask each of our trainees to recruit and mentor undergraduates in their laboratories for at least one summer or academic year.
• Partly as a result of these programs and partly due to the number of UCLA graduates now serving on the faculties of these feeder schools, developed closer relationships with UCLA "feeder" schools, including the community colleges Pierce College and Santa Monica College, and California State University at Los Angeles. Students at these campuses and their faculties have become more familiar with UCLA, and the result has been a dramatic upturn of interest in graduate studies.

• In evaluating minority applicants, we closely examine the application and will interview/admit URM applicants with low grade point averages or low GRE scores if other factors of the application are positive.
• Direct solicitation of students and summer research interns from faculty colleagues in the UC Leads and Summer Research Training Program.
• Faculty and student representation at Society for the Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science (SACNAS) and Annual Biomedical Research Conference for Minority Students (ABRCMS) meetings.
• Service on UCSF Diversity Committee.
• Participation in the NSF-sponsored Health Sciences Research Colloquium.
• Mailings and faculty visits to institutions with significant minority enrollments.
• Training grant is used as a recruiting inducement for minority students.

• Participation in SACNAS and ABRCMS conferences
• Health Sciences Special Services Program provides financial counseling and general support to minority students at UCSF.
• Summer Research Training Program (SRTP) for undergraduates. It has created a program in which faculty visit schools and national meetings to describe SRTP, our graduate programs, as well as the graduate student and research experience at UCSF, in general.
• During the graduate admissions process, we pay particular attention to identifying minority applicants based on personal experience (e.g. participation in SRTP, SACNAS, ABRCMS), self-identification on the admissions form, or in personal statements or letters of recommendation. Qualified candidates are invited for interviews, and final acceptance is based on assessment by the faculty and graduate student interviewers. Beginning next year, we intend to provide more intensive recruitment effort by 1) staging a poster session/research colloquium for URM candidates and current URM students, postdocs and faculty at UCSF, 2) assigning a current URM student to follow-up with the applicant following the interviews, and 3) assigning a faculty member to provide particular follow-up with the applicant following the interviews.
• Our mentorship of minority students includes careful attention by the Student Affairs Staff, and, in particular, by the student's Academic Advisor.
• In order for URM students to experience excitement of science directly, and to meet scientists, UCSF sponsors a "Career and Health Fair" in mid-November that is staffed by graduate and health professional faculty from UCSF. The Fair attracts approximately 500 attendees that include middle school students thinking about careers, college students deciding on careers, and adults seeking new careers.

• The Program Director and several CMB students attend SACNAS, ABRCMS, and a large number of local meetings for URM students.
• The Program Director and CMB students coordinate activities for the Summer Undergraduate Research Experience in Cell & Molecular Biology, which brings 12 - 15 undergraduates to our campus each summer. Many of these students eventually apply to the IBMS umbrella program.
• The Program Director and faculty visit HBCUs for seminars and recruiting trips.
• We discuss student diversity several times during our recruiting visits and current URM students serve on student panels, present posters, and speak about their work. These students openly discuss the climate on campus with prospective students.
• Recently the CMB students began meeting regularly with students funded by our Initiative to Maximize Student Diversity grant. Our goal is to do a large amount of joint programming to encourage students to interact and collaborate.
• Our program, the Graduate School, and a number of cross-campus initiatives provide URM students with excellent networking opportunities and provide a large and supportive community for our students.
• This summer we are instituting a 7-week mini-course "Seeing Campus Through Different Eyes" that will provide students and postdocs with a forum to discuss a variety of diversity issues. The program was developed with input from a diversity coordinator in the community.
• UNC recently completed a survey that provides hard data on how URM students, faculty and staff feel about the climate on our campus. Data from the survey has allowed us to develop workshops for faculty on cross-cultural mentoring. Although we do not currently require faculty to attend these workshops, many choose to voluntarily and we are considering requiring annual participation from faculty who receive training grant funds.

• Instill an awareness that the BTP is for the students and organized by the students who join the BTP for the excitement and opportunities of science.
• Student-organized BTP 'Minority Days' in conjunction with BTP Symposia. Promising seniors from two HBCUs, Virginia Union University and Norfolk State University, are invited to our biennial Symposia to meet with our trainees and visit laboratories.
• Continually seek BTP outreach opportunities: BTP faculty give science talks to students at Virginia Union University and collaborate with NSU grant initiative to place minority students and faculty in BTP research labs.
• Make our efforts well-known to students and faculty within the university via student-edited BTP newsletters.
• Actively maintain connections with minority and other BTP graduates.
• Encourage and expand the number of prominent BTP minority faculty (currently three, likely increasing to four or five shortly)
• The NIH recently awarded $3.6 Million to NSU to create the Center for Biotechnology and Biomedical Sciences (CBBS). In May 2006, Dr. Gordon Laurie became a member of Norfolk State University's Planning and Advisory Committee. One of the goals of the committee is to develop links between the University of Virginia and Norfolk State University to train and recruit minority faculty.

• The Training Program sends representatives to at least two national conferences each year. Recent examples include ABRCMS, SACNAS, and AISES.
• The Training Program provides funding and actively participates in several local conferences designed to encourage URM undergraduates and high school students to consider careers in science.
• The faculty serve as mentors in summer research programs for URM undergraduate and high school students as well as for teachers from high schools with significant URM enrollment.
• The Training Program's Web site has links to resources for URM students.
• Applicant backgrounds are factored into admissions decisions for URM applicants.

• presentation of seminars at universities and colleges with large populations of prospective minority graduate students;
• attendance at minority graduate fairs;
• involvement in minority undergraduate research programs, including active mentoring on student research committees;
• participation in science outreach programs relevant for minority students;
• hosting undergraduate URM students through summer programs;
• personally following up with phone calls, e-mails or conversations with prospective students;
• involvement in campus retention and climate efforts.
• use of training grant as a recruiting inducement for minority students.