BP-ENDURE at Hunter and NYU

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Diverse racial and ethnic groups, as well as individuals with disabilities and/or having socially, economically, or educationally disadvantaged backgrounds are underrepresented in neuroscience. Hunter College of the City University of New York (CUNY) and New York University (NYU) recognize that increasing the number of highly qualified neuroscientists from these underrepresented populations is integral to our future as academic and research institutions. Hunter College and NYU aim to increase the number of well-trained, diverse neuroscientists. BP-ENDURE at Hunter and NYU proposes to capitalize on and expand on the objectives and success of our first 5 years of BP-ENDURE funding, which has produced 43 program graduates in the program’s first 8 years who have applied to and been offered admission to graduate school. Importantly, 100% of BP-ENDURE graduates from Hunter and NYU who applied to doctoral programs were accepted to some of the best doctoral programs in the country, including Brown, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, UC Berkeley, UPenn, UCSF, Stanford, NYU, the University of Michigan, and Yale. Six of our graduates have been awarded NSF Graduate Research Fellowships. The overall goal of this application is to continue to develop and refine a neuroscience training program at Hunter that will encourage and prepare students from diverse backgrounds to enter into and succeed in neuroscience PhD programs. To achieve this goal, Hunter College has developed a research-educational partnership with five outstanding T32-awarded universities—New York University, Brown, the University of Michigan, Vanderbilt, and Yale. This partnership will expose 12 BP-ENDURE students from Hunter College and NYU per year to a research-intensive curriculum and an environment of excellence and active research. Moreover, because of the diversity of the proposed mentors, students will be exposed to a broad spectrum of researchers, including basic neuroscientists interested in central nervous system (CNS) issues and more applied neuroscientists from the areas clinical and cognitive neuroscience. During this funding period, five developmental activities are proposed: (1) To recruit and develop an outstanding group of undergraduate students from diverse backgrounds who are dedicated to neuroscience research; (2) To provide scientific skills and research experiences to our trainees through research placement with actively funded neuroscientists; (3) To implement academic development and curriculum enhancement activities rooted in the student’s research activities; (4) To facilitate effective mentoring by program faculty; and (5) To maintain an effective Administrative Core to support our students’ needs and development. Our measurable objectives during the requested funding period include: (1) attaining 85 to 90% acceptance of trainees to graduate school programs in neuroscience; (2) improving our students’ quantitative skills and academic achievement, and (3) improving our students’ scientific writing and oral presentation skills.