Medgar Evers College Research Initiative for Scientific Enhancement

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Medgar Evers College (MEC) of the City University of New York was established to serve as an anchor and provide quality, affordable higher education to Central Brooklyn residents, who often face common urban challenges: high poverty, crime, and unemployment, struggling K-12 public schools, and a dearth of resources. Ninety-eight percent of the college's 7,000 degree-seeking students come from populations that are underrepresented in the sciences and almost all represent the first generation attending college from their families. MEC has embarked on an innovative and substantial institutional collaboration with The State University of New York Downstate Medical Center campus located within 2 miles. The proposed MBRS RISE program is designed to leverage this institutional collaboration by facilitating students' ability to pursue the highest levels of academic and professional achievement in scientific disciplines while building MEC longer- term research and training capacity. This MEC MBRS RISE program will enhance the general institutional research culture and in particular, research training among MEC undergraduates, resulting in increases in the number of students pursuing doctoral study in the biomedical sciences. The program will provide mentored research experiences and support 16 MEC undergraduates per year with the expected outcome of at least 75% of participants advancing to doctoral study in the biomedical sciences with a completion rate of at least 80%. MEC RISE students will be selected from an initial applicant pool of at least 35 qualified student applicants, emanating from a potential applicant pool of >400 based on minimum 2.8 GPA and strong research career interest gleaned from interviews and student interaction. Each participant will be placed in an academic year internship with a research mentor (principal investigator) in laboratories in the near term at SUNY Downstate Medical Center, with the longer-term objective of expanding placement opportunities to productive laboratories at MEC. A cohort of at least 20 MEC RISE Associates will parallel RISE Scholars participation in all MEC RISE activities, except that they will not receive direct salary support for academic year research training. Research training for RISE Associates will be focused on summer research opportunities at T32 granted institutions and travel to scientific meetings underwritten by meeting based travel awards. Participants will attend 1-3 to regional/national scientific meetings, requiring them to submit posters/presentations to at least one meeting. The program will provide an enhanced curriculum aimed at preparing MEC RISE students for admission into competitive graduate (PhD and MD/PhD) programs in the biomedical sciences by offering mandatory developmental workshops/courses; enhance the institutional research culture at MEC through leveraging the MEC RISE program by hosting an annual on-campus symposium to demonstrate student research achievement at MEC. This program will leverage the institutional relationship with SUNY Downstate Medical Center that serves as the foundation for near-term MEC RISE student research training to develop inter institutional faculty research collaborations.