Columns:: ‘Bridges to the Doctorate’ NIH grant will support graduate education of minority students at UGA

since 12/15/98

Columns::September 3, 2002

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‘Bridges to the Doctorate’ NIH grant will support graduate education of minority students at UGA

By Sheila Roberson
roberson@mail.rx.uga.edu

The College of Pharmacy has received $595,000 from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health to support graduate education of minority students. The “Bridges to the Doctorate” grant will fund an interdisciplinary, inter-institutional program designed to increase the number of minority graduates in the biomedical sciences, with the ultimate goal of making UGA a regional center for the training of minority, or underrepresented, students.
“Our efforts are in support of the university’s strategic goal to increase minority student education on campus,” says Doug Boudinot, associate dean of the Graduate School.
UGA will partner with historically black North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, which offers master’s degrees only in the physical sciences, as a source for graduate students. Six students will be recruited each year for three years for NCAT’s M.S. programs in biochemistry, chemistry, physics, chemical engineering and mathematics. These students will then matriculate to UGA for a doctoral degree in a discipline dealing with the biomedical sciences.
The program, which is funded at an approximate rate of $200,000 per year, will provide M.S. support at NCAT. UGA’s Graduate School will provide 21-month stipends for doctoral work at UGA. At the end of that period, the student’s department will provide the stipend until the doctorate is completed.
“This funding is particularly important because most students will be recruited from the underrepresented ‘Black Belt’ in the southeastern United States,” says Tony Capomacchia, director of the program and graduate coordinator and associate professor in the UGA College of Pharmacy’s department of pharmaceutical and biomedical sciences. “It is especially important to recruit students for the pharmaceutical and biomedical sciences because the minority population needs to participate in the reduction of health disparities within its own population.”
NCAT is the only college close to UGA to qualify for this type of inter-institutional program. The historically black colleges and universities in Georgia either don’t have graduate degree programs or don’t offer degrees in these science disciplines. Physical science students are being targeted because they have fewer opportunities to enter biomedical science fields.
Mentor collaboration between the two institutions will be developed to foster retention and facilitate communication during the M.S./Ph.D. program. Caesar Jackson, NCAT dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, will serve as the program’s co-director on the NCAT campus.
“The Bridges to the Doctorate program is innovative in that it broadens the scope of what is normally offered in the general biomedical sciences to include pharmaceutical, agricultural and engineering sciences, such as bioinformatics, biophysics and bioengineering,” Capomacchia says. “Few minority doctoral-level scientists are being trained for academia, industry and government positions in these fields, or in biochemistry or genetics.”

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