Dr. Linton is the Director of American Indian Outreach housed within the Office of the Provost at the University of Kansas. Dr. Linton was born and raised on the Morongo reservation in Southern California and is an enrolled member of the Morongo Band of Mission Indians. Dr. Linton went on to attend the University of California, Riverside and became the first reservation Indian in California to attend university. She earned a Ph.D. in Psychology at UCLA and went on to a successful career in research and teaching at San Diego State University and the University of Utah. Dr. Linton has mentored underrepresented minority students in her capacity as President of the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science (SACNAS). In 1986, Dr. Linton joined the faculty at Arizona State University (ASU) where she devoted her full professional effort to developing programs that supported the mentoring and training of American Indians and other underrepresented students in math and science. At ASU, Dr. Linton helped prepare minority students to enter the teacher preparation program and obtain scholarships, trained teacher aides in an on-reservation program for the White Mountain Apache Tribe, and led ASU's participation in the Rural System Initiative project funded by the National Science Foundation, which served schools on 19 reservations. After accepting the position of Director of American Indian Outreach at University of Kansas (KU) in 1998, Dr. Linton immediately sought to establish collaborations that would increase and improve mentoring and training of students underrepresented in the sciences. Dr. Linton's mentoring initiatives led to five National Institutes of Health funded programs that have led to the participation and mentoring of more than 200 KU and Haskell students. Hundreds more students, both minority and majority, have benefited from the institutionalization of aspects of these programs. Dr. Linton has also been a forerunner in the national effort to mentor emerging scientists through her leadership in SACNAS. As President and now as Past-President of SACNAS, Dr. Linton has worked to develop networking and mentoring strategies that encourage nationally recognized scientists within SACNAS to mentor thousands of students at all levels of training from undergraduates through early faculty years. Currently she works to provide mentoring and leadership training for all levels of SACNAS members. Dr. Linton has utilized her experiences as a behavioral scientist of American Indian descent to develop personal mentoring relationships with a number of the students supported by the projects she initiated.
