Tennessee State University has had the MARC Program since 1980, which has undergone continuous evaluation and adjustments. During the last five years (2000-2004), 33 students have graduated from the program. Twenty-four of these students (72.7%) have gone to graduate schools (17 in Ph.D. programs), 4 have gone to medical schools and 2 are in pharmacy schools (Table 12 on page 154). Since 1995, eight of our former MARC graduates had obtained their Ph.D. degrees (page 151 and Table 7) and 4 more are getting their Ph.D. degrees in Spring 2005 (one each from Vanderbilt, Cincinnati, Washington Univ., and Yale). Another 4 to 6 are expected to get Ph.D.s by May 2006 (Table 8 on page 151 and letters in Appendix VII B). All of our 25 students who are in Ph.D. programs are doing well (except one who is recovering from illness). The goal of our MARC U*STAR Program for the next five years will continue to be to increase competitively trained underrepresented minority students to enter and successfully complete their research doctorates. The emphasis will be to prepare them to be competitive in graduate programs like our 32 former trainees (25 in Ph.D.) at Harvard, MIT, Yale, Vanderbilt, Emory, Illinois, Ohio State, etc. To achieve this goal we are proposing the following objectives, similar to our current objectives, with some additional training activities: (1) To increase the number of U*STAR graduates who will enter graduate programs by 10% (from the current 73% to 80%). (2) To provide services to non-MARC students who are interested in research for placements in extramural summer research programs, GRE training and participation in our seminars. (3) To more than double the number of trainees who will receive Ph.D.s from 8 to 20 (150% gain). Four have received Ph.D.s already since 1999 and 4 more are receiving Ph.D.s in May 2005. (4) To offer challenging curricula including academic year research and off-campus summer research experiences for the MARC trainees and to prepare them to succeed in research doctorates. (5) To increase the scientific presentations at professional meetings from 10 to 32 in five years. We will require that each student present at least one paper at a national professional meeting during their training. Our trainees have also published 7 articles in peer-reviewed journals during this cycle compared to none in previous cycles and we will continue to improve on that also. (Please refer to page 172.) (6) To increase the average GRE scores (V+Q) from 760 (average of newly appointed trainees) to 1050, a gain of 38%. The proposed objectives are achievable targets as discussed on pages 136-141. Research facilities in the participating departments and at our collaborating institutions are adequate for the proposed training (Please refer to the Resources).
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