UC receives grant to prepare underrepresented students for doctoral biomedical science programs
$1.5 million NIH grant funds new UC College of Medicine program
The University of Cincinnati College of Medicine has received a $1.5 million award from the National Institutes of Health to create a Postbaccalaureate Research Education Program (PREP) to help under-represented minority or disabled college-graduates better prepare for entrance into biomedical science doctoral programs.
The UC PREP program will accept 23 scholars into the program during the next five years for a yearlong experience in biomedical research training to help them become better candidates when they apply to doctoral programs. The first four scholars will begin July 1, 2021.
PREP scholars will conduct research in laboratories at the College of Medicine and Cincinnati Children’s, take graduate classes, attend seminars, receive training in laboratory skills, and have substantial mentoring from College of Medicine faculty and current graduate students.
“PREP scholars will have just completed an undergraduate degree that’s relevant to biomedical sciences,” says Carolyn Price, PhD, professor in the Department of Cancer Biology, who will serve as principal investigator on the grant. She added that PREP scholars will become UC employees paid $29,000 for the year and receive health benefits while in the program.
Price will co-lead the program with Alison Weiss, PhD, professor in the Department of Molecular Genetics, Biochemistry and Microbiology. The program is based in the college’s Office of Graduate Education.
While the program is aimed at underrepresented minorities, Price and Weiss say they hope to attract a number of recent college graduates who are from the Appalachian region. Cincinnati is at the edge of the economically distressed Appalachia. The city also is home to large Black and Appalachian populations and a growing Hispanic population, all with high rates of poverty.
“The people this program is aiming to help are very talented individuals who haven’t had the research experience that would make them competitive for graduate programs,” Weiss says. “Many of these students are going to a college where they don’t have hands-on research labs and their course work is mainly didactic. The goal is to get them ready to work in a lab, get them prepared to be accepted into a doctoral program and successfully finish their degree.”
Price added that “these are people who haven’t had the life experience to be ready for graduate school and so basically the PREP program is an on-ramp to graduate school and to level the playing field.”
Another goal of the PREP program is to expose scholars to the wide assortment of careers that are available to biomedical doctoral graduates. Doctoral graduates can find a wide assortment of career opportunities not only in academia but also in government and industry.
Dr. Carolyn Price, Dr. Alison Weiss and Dr. Iain Cartwright.
About three-quarters of each scholar’s time will be spent training in research with the rest learning skills needed to succeed as a doctoral student and scientist. Scholars will learn how to read scientific journal articles, how to prepare and write scientific material, how to communicate science and how to design experiments, among other skills, in both formal and informal workshops.
Chrystelle Vilfranc is currently in her final year of a doctoral program in cancer and cell biology at the College of Medicine. She participated in a PREP program at the University of Alabama Birmingham (UAB) after receiving her bachelor’s degree in biochemistry from Oakwood University, a historically Black university in Huntsville, Alabama.
“I definitely would not have gotten into a doctoral program without PREP,” she says. Vilfranc, a native of Brooklyn, New York, had applied to a graduate program at UAB but was not accepted. Instead, the university suggested she apply to their PREP program.
“I had never heard about the PREP program. It was actually better than I had anticipated. It made me realize I never could have survived grad school right out of college. It’s really important to have that transition year, especially for a student from a more diverse background,” she says.
Chrystelle Vilfranc
While a PREP scholar, she applied to 13 graduate programs and was accepted by 11, ultimately choosing to come to the College of Medicine.
“It’s a perfect transition program,” Vilfranc says. “You get paid to figure out your next step. You get to do research. You get health insurance. You get to learn about the ins and outs of graduate school. There was so much I thought I knew about grad school but it wasn’t until I was in this program and working alongside a grad student before I knew what grad school was really about. I wasn’t in culture shock when I got to UC because of PREP.”
The mentoring Vilfranc received at UAB will be an integral part of the UC PREP program.
“Each scholar will have a research mentor in an area that they’re interested in. They also will have diversity mentors, both faculty and near-peer mentors. We’ve reached out across the college and university to find faculty who are willing and interested in providing mentorship to the scholars. The enthusiasm with which our request was received was most gratifying,” Price says. Near-peer mentors will come from UC’s very active chapter of the Society for Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics and Native Americans in Science (SACNAS). SACNAS members volunteered to serve as near-peer mentors to the PREP scholars and also gave input into the design of the PREP program training.
One of the faculty mentors in the PREP program will be Teresa Reyes PhD, associate professor in the medical college’s Department of Pharmacology and Systems Physiology.
Teresa Reyes, PhD
“I want to be involved in this program for two primary reasons,” Reyes says. “The first is that mentoring engaged and motivated students before they enter graduate school is one of the best parts of my job, and the opportunities provided by the PREP program will position the scholars as strong candidates for graduate school. Secondly, the program is directed at recruiting underrepresented minority and disadvantaged students, which I think is critically important for the success of science. There is a clear need for a more diverse and representative population of biomedical researchers, because a diverse population needs a diverse workforce to embrace a broad range of research questions. We gain strength with richness.”
The PREP program also hopes to involve scholars’ families by having them be a strong support mechanism by visiting the UC campus, seeing the labs in which they work and watching scholars make research presentations.
Price says the PREP program is partnering with several colleges and universities which are expected to serve as a pipeline for applicants to the program. These include Northern Kentucky University, Eastern Kentucky University, Tennessee State University, Fisk University, West Virginia University Health Sciences Center and Central State University.
“The support we received from our partner institutions as we prepared our grant application was key to us receiving program funding from the NIH,” Price says.
While scholars in the program can apply to graduate programs at any university, Price and Weiss hope that UC PREP scholars will become enamored with the university and Cincinnati and ultimately apply to a doctoral program at the College of Medicine. The college’s Office of Graduate Education has made significant efforts in recent years to increase the number of underrepresented minorities in its programs.
Under the leadership of Iain Cartwright, PhD, who retired at the end of October after six years as associate dean of graduate education, the college has seen a 63% increase in the number of underrepresented minorities admitted to its graduate programs.
“Not only have we managed to significantly increase the percentage of underrepresented minority students in our programs over time, but the percentage of earned PhD degrees achieved by these students on an annual basis has really climbed in the last couple of years,” Cartwright says.
The PREP program was one of Cartwright’s important long-term goals for the Office of Graduate Education.
The grant, known as an R25 award from the National Institute of Medical Sciences, will cover the costs of the PREP program for five years. There will be four scholars accepted for each of the first two years of UC’s program. Five scholars will be in the program each of the next three years. After that, UC will need to reapply to the NIH for additional funding to continue the program. The NIH goal is that 75% of scholars will be accepted into doctoral programs and then 75% of students in doctoral programs will receive their degrees.
There are currently 42 other PREP programs in the country.
Weiss says she is passionate about this program because she came from a very modest background with parents who never went to college. “I had to go up a real steep learning curve to get prepared for grad school. I took two years off after I got my BA and worked as a research technician, so I get it.”
Price recalls a number of trainees who have come from disadvantaged backgrounds that she has mentored. Many struggled because their undergraduate education and life experience did not adequately prepare them for a career in research and there was not sufficient institutional support beyond the mentoring Price provided them. The PREP program will offer the additional support and training needed to help the scholar succeed, she says.
In addition to Price and Weiss, there will be at least 25 other College of Medicine faculty involved in the program, including some based at Cincinnati Children’s.
Additional information about the PREP program is available online at https://med.uc.edu/education/graduate-education/PREP/.
Featured photo of Dr. Iain Cartwright, Dr. Carolyn Price and Dr. Alison Weiss by Lisa Britton.
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