MARC U-STAR Program at Washington University in St. Louis

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Washington University is widely recognized for excellence in undergraduate and graduate education in the biomedical and behavioral sciences. As a consistent performer in diversity outcomes and one of the nation's leading research institutions, Washington University is particularly well suited to be part of the solution to under representation of minority students in these sciences. Our proposed MARC U-STAR program is a comprehensive, four-year program that capitalizes on the large number of our high-potential minority students and on our existing infrastructure that has been so successful at recruiting and retaining minority students in the biomedically-related sciences. Our recruitment and retention strategy builds upon existing infrastructure to attract underrepresented minorities to the sciences, build an early scholarly community for the students, empower them early in their choice to pursue science degrees, train them in biomedical research, and retain them in the biomedical and behavioral sciences pipeline to and through graduate school at Washington University or elsewhere. This program will be part of a critical component of a greater university-wide initiative to increase the percentage of Washington University graduates enrolling in and completing Ph.D. programs. Our rationale is that while we do not serve as many minority students as other universities with majority-minority populations, all of our minority students (830 students in 2006) have very high previous achievements and have high potential to complete Ph.D.'s in a biomedical or behavioral science. Further, around 60% of our minority students (130 per entering class) cite biomedically-related science as an academic and career interest upon entrance to the University, yet only a tiny fraction pursue biomedically-relevant Ph.D.'s. We propose to support 6 students per entering class in the training program; this is more than feasible, given our minority population, our high student interest in the biomedically-related sciences, and high student success rate in these fields. With even a modest, 75% success rate at MARC-scholar Ph.D. pursuits, we will realize an approximately four-fold increase in the number of Ph.D. pursuits of our minority students in the biomedically-relevant sciences.