UIC Chancellor Receives $1.4 Million to Recruit Transfer Students in Sciences

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Newswise — Backed by a $1.4 million federal grant, the University of Illinois at Chicago will launch a new program to increase the number of underrepresented students who pursue degrees and research careers in the behavioral and biomedical sciences.

The five-year grant from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, one of the National Institutes of Health, partners UIC with the City Colleges of Chicago in an effort to bolster recruitment, training, mentorship, and degree completion in health-related fields for students from underrepresented backgrounds.

Beginning in 2014, UIC’s Behavioral and Biomedical Sciences Bridges to the Baccalaureate Program will recruit 58 students, 18 in the first year and 10 in each of the remaining four years, who qualify to transfer to UIC from the City Colleges. Participants will pursue their UIC degree in one of three areas aligned with their research and career interests: nursing; public health; or liberal arts and sciences, in subject areas such as biology, chemistry, psychology or physics.

“Researchers from underrepresented populations are in high demand, given persistent societal health disparities,” said UIC Chancellor Paula Allen-Meares, the grant’s principal investigator.

“As one of the most diverse universities in the nation, UIC is well-positioned, and eager, to offer this program that will give transfer students from underrepresented backgrounds the skills to be successful not only in their academic career, but as professional health scientists,” Allen-Meares said.

The program will offer students an intensive summer research skills workshop, an assigned research mentor, access to peer-tutors, and support for science and academic skill development through group activities. A health science conference is also being planned.

Students selected for the program will begin preparation for baccalaureate studies at the conclusion of their freshman year.

The program’s public health track seeks to advance knowledge and skills not only in basic sciences, but in two disciplines — epidemiology and biostatistics — that are considered critical to understanding public health problems.

Students who bridge to the undergraduate nursing program will be trained in research methods and statistical analysis along with skills in managing the health-care needs of individuals and communities.

Students in any of the liberal arts and sciences subject areas will prepare for professional and graduate study in diverse specialties such as cancer biology, tissue engineering and neuroscience.

“This program will enhance the students’ basic research skills, such as quantitative and qualitative analysis, critical thinking and innovation,” Allen-Meares said. ”These skills, and the capacity for leadership and collaboration, will be gained by working alongside faculty members in their respective programs.”

Retention and graduation rates will be tracked during and after the funding period to gauge the success of the program’s student support system.

The participants’ educational and career paths after graduation will be followed to gauge the program’s success in elevating the number of students from underrepresented backgrounds that enter graduate programs, receive doctoral degrees and pursue research careers.
The program also aims to foster collaborations and professional development opportunities between UIC and City Colleges of Chicago faculty that will enhance the educational experience for participating students, Allen-Meares said.

Current partnerships between UIC and the City Colleges include the Guaranteed Admission Transfer program, which offers City Colleges students guaranteed undergraduate admission to UIC after successful completion of their first two years of college, and a NIH-sponsored Bridges to the Doctorate for Minority Nursing Students program in the UIC College of Nursing.

The new program is also tied to UIC’s role directing the Illinois State Board of Education’s Health Science Learning Exchange, which began in 2012 as part of a $10.3 million public-private partnership to better prepare Illinois students for careers in science, technology, engineering and math fields. Allen-Meares and Bruce C. Neimeyer, associate vice chancellor for special programs, are co-investigators for a five-year $833,090 grant from the Department of Education to coordinate the exchange’s statewide network of businesses, employer associations, education partners, and other stakeholders.

Co-investigators on the new National Institute of General Medical Sciences grant include Neimeyer, Karin Opacich, Brian Kay, and Julie Zerwic of UIC and Michael Davis of the City Colleges of Chicago.

The City Colleges of Chicago is the largest community college system in Illinois and one of the largest in the nation, with 5,800 faculty and staff serving 120,000 students annually at seven colleges city-wide.

UIC ranks among the nation’s leading research universities and is Chicago’s largest university with 27,500 students, 12,000 faculty and staff, 15 colleges and the state’s major public medical center. A hallmark of the campus is the Great Cities Commitment, through which UIC faculty, students and staff engage with community, corporate, foundation and government partners to improve the quality of life in metropolitan areas around the world.

More about UIC.

University of Utah Awarded $20.4 Million From NIH to Advance Translational Research in Medicine

 

Newswise — For parents whose infants have been diagnosed with spinal muscular atrophy, comprehending what the rare condition means for their child’s life can be devastating. SMA is a progressive, debilitating and potentially fatal disease of the motor neurons caused by the absence of the survival motor neuron gene, or SMN1. It’s a condition that occurs in one in every 6,000 live births.

But researchers at the University of Utah Center for Clinical and Translational Science are giving parents dealing with the heartbreak of seeing a child diagnosed with the condition something important: Hope for a cure. Researchers have made strides in understanding SMA, everyday coming steps closer to finding an effective treatment for the genetic condition. Their work is only one example of potentially life-changing research taking place daily at the Center.

The Center taps into the University of Utah’s strengths in genetics and bioinformatics to translate promising bench science into practices that improve health. It serves as an academic home for clinical and translational research, developing innovative health services for the community and health researchers, and training a new generation of clinical and translational investigators.

The Center’s track record of success this month has earned it a $20.4 million grant from the National Institutes of Health that will allow it to provide support for all aspects of translational research over the next five years. The University of Utah is just one of 15 institutions in the U.S. selected this month to receive an NIH Clinical and Translational Science Award or CTSA.

“This award is important to continue our work in translational science. This funding will help scientists and physicians train those who may be responsible for tomorrow’s medical breakthroughs,” said Vivian S. Lee, M.D., Ph.D., MBA and University of Utah senior vice president for health sciences.

“We’ve already made a number of important research discoveries in our Center for Clinical and Translational Science, and the NIH’s continued support of our facility shows their confidence in our commitment to keep making strides in several research areas,” said Lee, also dean of the School of Medicine and CEO of University of Utah Health Care.

Donald McClain, M.D. Ph.D., and Carrie Byington, M.D., —the Center’s directors —said the new NIH funding will help the University of Utah to continue to be an important voice in the broader discussion of improving the quality of health care while reducing costs.

"The importance of this Center to the State of Utah is that it brings resources together that support the full range of clinical research, from basic discovery science to how research findings are best implemented into the practices of our community physicians. The Center facilitates the communication among all of our stakeholders, so that investigators making basic discoveries can speak with experts in turning those discoveries into new cures or diagnostics, and they in turn can speak to experts in partnering with industry to get the products to market,” said McClain, who besides overseeing the Center, serves as Associate Vice President for Clinical and Translational Science, the Bettilyon Chair in Diabetes Research and a Professor of Internal Medicine and Biochemistry at the University of Utah.

“In this partnership among Intermountain Healthcare, the Veterans Administration, the Utah Department of Health, and the University of Utah, we can ensure that advances made across the entire nation are brought to the entire population of Utah rapidly and safely,” he added.

Byington noted one of the research initiatives linked to the Center is a planning grant to develop a National Research Mentoring Network for those under-represented in medicine. The mentoring network represents a novel approach to increase the national capacity for biomedical science through the recruitment and training of the best and brightest candidates from all backgrounds. Byington serves as principal investigator of the planning award given to support the development of the network through the entire CTSA consortium of 60 sites.

“Participation in the CTSA consortium allows Utah to address some of the most important issues in biomedical science and to collaborate with some of the best academic health centers in the U.S.,” said Byington, the H.A. and Edna Benning Presidential Professor of Pediatrics, Vice Dean for Academic Affairs and Faculty Development and Vice Chair for the Research Enterprise, Department of Pediatrics at the University of Utah.

The NIH started the CTSA program in 2006 as a tool in the health care reform movement to provide higher quality and more affordable health care to people. The University of Utah receiving its first round of CTSA funding in 2008, when it joined other institutions across the country in trying to find research breakthroughs that could change outcomes in patient care more rapidly move breakthroughs in basic research to breakthroughs in patient care.

The University of Utah Center for Clinical and Translational Science consists of eight core areas including biomedical informatics; clinical services; community outreach and collaboration; patient-centered outcomes research methods; recruitment, retention and safety; research education, training and career development; study design and biostatistics and translational technologies and resources.

Besides researching conditions like SMA, the Center for Clinical and Translational Science has worked on literally hundreds of protocols, including studies related to obesity and cancer, said McClain.
By 2018, the Center has a number of goals it wants to meet, including:
• Increasing the quality, quantity, safety, efficiency and impact of translational research for all conditions.
• Providing resources and services to support and speed clinical and translational research of all kinds.
• Training, mentoring and supporting the next generation of translational investigators to become principal investigators and productive faculty members.
• Creating a leadership structure that represents all aspects of translational science.
• Engaging in a process of continuous evaluation, improvement and innovation in all of these areas.
• Proving special expertise to a CTSA consortium in the areas of human genetics, genotype/phenotype correlation, health services research including comparative effectiveness, medical device innovation, and the development of electronic health records as tools for medical care and research.