The overall goal of the New Jersey Medical School Neuroscience Summer Program for High School students is to stimulate and motivate careers in neuroscience/behavioral health research among inner-city minority students who attend science and technology high schools. The rapidly expanding fields of neuroscience and mental health research will continue to create the demand for scientists of all types for many years to come. It is desirable to have a diversified, ethical work force. This project will engage several inner-city institutions of higher learning in a cooperative effort to mentor, train, and collaborate with capable and interested minority high school students and teachers to develop a sustainable program stimulus for motivating students toward neuroscience. By providing a structured program of seminars, technology training, workshops, demonstrations, clinical and laboratory and research experiences, minority students will have opportunities to develop projects and relationships with a wide variety of active clinical and basic biomedical researchers in Neuroscience and Behavioral Health, including those studying substance abuse disorders, AIDS, aging, depression, pain, epilepsy, gender hormones, and predatory rage in animals, neuro-imaging correlates of cognition and emotion, Huntington's Disease, neurosurgery, and neuropsychology. Teachers from these schools will also be trained and major emphasis for both student and teacher participants will be technology training and development of a web-based neuroscience elective for High School students that meet district requirements. Scientific integrity and bioethics will be stressed. The program will be linked with existing programs that complement its scope and will include a variety of short-term and long-term subjective and objective outcome and quality improvement measures.
