GEMS, a Short-Term Summer Internship Program for Diverse Students

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This is a competing renewal application for a short-term research education program originally funded as a T35 in 2000 and as an R25 in 2010. Our major objective is to continue providing annual short-term research education experiences for highly motivated students from under-represented backgrounds in order to expose them to biomedical research in the area of pulmonary and cardiovascular disease. Locally known as GEMS (Graduate Experiences for Multicultural Students), over the past 10 years, >138 undergraduate (UG) and 29 health professional students (HPS); >125 supported by the R25 and the rest supported by other programs. Collectively, these students have published 93 manuscripts; >70% have earned terminal degrees, are working in science or health-related fields or are still enrolled in school. More than 70% of student participants were under-represented ethnic minorities. The program builds upon our established infrastructure and uses the significant strengths of one of the top pulmonary medicine programs in the country. We continue the tradition of addressing the pipeline by requesting 10 undergraduate and 4 health professional student slots. Here, in addition to the usual didactic and hands-on research activities, we will use the model of academic “coaches” who are not intended to supplant the mentor, but rather complement this relationship. Coaches will be past GEMS participants who are still at Anschutz Medical Campus. Coaches will maintain contact with the students throughout the year and will guide them through a successful career path. Furthermore, to ensure student success, we propose to use social science approaches and provide the students with a toolkit that will create an environment, a community of practice, where they feel safe to talk about personal, academic and professional issues and to bond through shared norms and values. We will also implement implicit bias workshops and mentoring best practices for students and mentors. We incorporate a set of targeted questions in the application that will aid in selection of students highly motivated to pursue biomedical research. We believe that these approaches will continue the GEMS tradition of excellence in training students from under-represented backgrounds while at the same time enhancing student’s academic success beyond the summer GEMS internship.