U. gets $1.2 million from NIH

The University has been awarded a $1.2 million grant by the National Institutes of Health to support an international training program in biomedical research for underrepresented minorities. The three-year program -- called the Minority International Research Training Program -- is the result of a collaborative effort between the University and two of the country's leading black universities, Lincoln and Howard, according to Saul Winegrad, professor of physiology and chief architect of the MIRT program at the University. The program, which will begin next May, will match 18 students with internships established by the University in laboratories around the world, including sites in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East. "It's going to be a highly individualized program where any student in that program will get a great deal of individualized attention," Winegrad said. "A heavy investment of time and energy and resources will go into that individual so that the success rate will be very high." The program was designed to send nine undergraduate students, nine graduate students and one or two faculty members overseas. The undergraduates will stay abroad for three months, the graduates will remain for up to nine months and the faculty members will be able to stay for a full year. Applicants will be selected based on a two-tiered process -- one at the individual institutional level and the other consisting of an advisory board of representatives from each university -- Winegrad said. "We are interested in judging several things, not only the academic qualifications and not only the commitment and the interest in the program, but the social maturity to be able to handle going to a foreign country for the first time, going into a laboratory where you basically know no one and not only surviving but having a constructive experience," he said. "Studying abroad has the potential to profoundly change the lives of minority students," said Joy Gleason Carew, director of the Center for the Study of Critical Languages and Cultures at Lincoln University and a member of MIRT's local advisory committee in a statement issued by the University Medical Center. "These students, when removed from the social and political context of the United States, are able to revise their views of themselves and reach beyond other people's perceptions of their abilities," Carew added. Winegrad said he hopes the program will provide all those involved with a worldly experience. "Research is truly international," Winegrad said. "Not only is the content of it international and the application of it international, but the community is truly international."

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