Located on the south-side of Chicago, Chicago State University (CSU) is a liberal arts, public institution with a predominantly African-American student body. CSU serves the highest proportion of black students of all public universities in the Illinois-lndiana-lowa-Wisconsin contiguous four-state region where it produces the largest of black baccalaureate degree recipients. As an urban comprehensive university, CSU faces both the opportunity and the challenge of educating students who are mostly raised and educated within a ten-mile radius of the campus and are products of both an economically-disadvantaged background and often a high-school education which has not prepared them for college-level work. The CSU MBRS SCORE Program is a response to the NIH initiative to improve significantly the research capabilities of minority and minority-serving institutions as a means to address the need to increase the numbers of minority students entering doctoral programs in the biomedical sciences. The quantitative goals of the CSU MBRS SCORE Program are (i) to increase the number of junior faculty engaged in biomedical research, and (ii) to increase the number of biomedical research publications from CSU teaching faculty. The qualitative goal of the Program is to create a research environment at CSU which stimulates faculty to engage in discovery research and which, by example, encourages students to direct their career goals to leadership positions in biomedical research. The CSU Program organizes its activities around faculty-led research projects in biology and chemistry. The current Program consists of eight investigator-initiated research projects of which all but one is led by junior faculty who have been hired within the past four years. This new Application proposes an increase in the number of projects supported to fourteen projects and one pilot project. This increase in funded discovery research will provide additional training opportunities for minority students and will thereby impact the number of African-Americans entering careers in biomedical research.
