The renewal of the Initiative for Minority Student Development (IMSD) program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH) will continue to help facilitate the university's effort to increase the involvement of underrepresented minority (URM) students in biomedical and behavioral research to enhance their competitiveness as prospective graduate students and as individuals completing their doctoral programs. Public Health will be prominently represented among students conducting behavioral science research. Indeed, a number of graduate students supported via IMSD have been from the UNC School of Public Health. The UNC-CH IMSD program will continue to stimulate and facilitate the involvement of URM undergraduate students in biomedical and behavioral research, work with academic departments to increase the number of URM Ph.D. students, and provide enhanced opportunities for minority medical and dental students to be involved in basic biomedical research. The research will be relevant to the biomedical, public health, and clinical science communities. But a major thrust of the continued program will be the collaborative arrangement with the Interdisciplinary Biomedical Sciences Program (IBMS) and working collaboratively with PI/program directors of T32 projects to broadly increase the number of URM Ph.D. students. Additionally, through IMSD support, the IBMS program will establish a transitional master's program that will enroll students with promise but who need additional research experiences before embarking on the IBMS Ph.D. program, which allows students to select specific academic departments after one year. A foundation of the IMSD program is the strength of UNC-CH's strong research activities and its efforts in enhancing and promoting diversity among its student body. Research training and the mentoring concept are the cornerstones of the IMSD program. At steady state and across all components, the program will provide research compensation for more than 40 students annually.
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