UCI Gets Grant to Boost Minorities in Biological Sciences

UC Irvine has been awarded a $1.2-million grant to encourage more undergraduate women, blacks and Latinos to pursue careers in the biological sciences, university officials announced Wednesday.

Nationally, less than 5% of these students earn undergraduate degrees in the sciences, and even fewer go on to graduate school, according U.S. census data compiled by the Digest of Education. At UCI, of the 3,000 undergraduate students who are biological sciences majors, about 500 are black or Latino, according to Dennis Smith, the school’s dean of biological sciences.

Smith said UCI plans to use the grant to create programs that pay special attention to those students already studying biological sciences, and to recruit more women and minorities at the community college and high school levels.

Among those programs is one in which students in their sophomore year will be recruited to participate in small research teams with senior scientists, Smith said. Students will be offered a $2,000 stipend to continue taking part in the research teams during the summer.

“This will give them an initial exposure to the research environment,” Smith said. “The real goal is to get more of these kids to eventually go to graduate school and obtain Ph.D.s in biological sciences.”

A similar research program, minus the summer stipend, is currently offered to undergraduates as part of the biological sciences curriculum, he said.

Grant money will also be used to send university representatives to community colleges and high schools to encourage students to take up biological sciences at UC Irvine, Smith said. “We have to reach out to these younger students to let them know about the opportunities in the biological sciences,” Smith said.

In addition to programs aimed at women, blacks and Latinos, Smith said, the grant money will be used to enroll all graduate students who are teaching assistants in a seminar to improve their teaching skills. Grant money will also be used to create a computer-based science laboratory available to all students, Smith said.

The grant proposal was written with the help of UC Irvine’s Biological Sciences Committee on Minority Education, he added.

The grant money, which will be spent during the next 5 years, will be monitored by a steering committee of minority students, officials of high schools and community colleges in the area and UC Irvine faculty and administrators. Smith will be co-director of the grant program.

UC Irvine is among 51 universities that received a grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, established in 1953 to conduct medical research. In 1987, the institute began awarding grants to strengthen undergraduate science education.

The grants, which range from $1 million to $2 million, will be paid to the universities in two installments over 5 years. UC campuses in Davis, Santa Cruz and San Diego will also receive Hughes grants.