Consortium for the National Research Mentoring Network

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Substantial evidence exists for the underrepresentation of minorities in all levels of the biomedical workforce, from the undergraduate level to the professoriate. The fact that our country's changing demographics will result soon in a college-age population that is majority underrepresented minority (URM) and women makes it imperative that new interventions take place to keep America competitive in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). We have created a Consortium of 25 mainstream biomedical scientific societies, minority science organizations, university STEM minority programs, and non-profits with four BUILD planning grant applicants to develop a planning grant for a National Research Mentoring Network. Most of these partners have a long history of interacting making the development of such a large network feasible. These Consortium members each have a strong documented record of developing mentoring programs for URMs and other underrepresented groups including women in the sciences, the disabled and gay, lesbian and transgender (LGBTQ) scientists. We are proposing to work together to develop a national mentoring network. These discipline-specific scientific societies have various minority affairs committees to conceptualize and implement their diversity efforts. These have clearly had positive impacts on the inclusion of African Americans, Hispanics, American Indians, the disabled, and LGBTQ students (all here defined as URMs) in their own sub-fields of biomedical research. The Consortium also brings in expertise in social sciences, computer sciences, communications, e-mentoring, web based science video networks and databases - and ongoing evaluation - to ensure that we identify technology and approaches that are data-based or can be evaluated and will be adaptable to all of our communities. During the planning grant the Consortium will work to fully develop partnerships, assess mentoring capabilities and best practices, identify novel and innovative mentoring models, and develop strategies to scale local activities to the national level.