PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT The low number of college graduates from UR groups in Arkansas, together with the small number of UR students nationally who graduate in the biological sciences, results in a small pool of UR students entering fields of biomedical research in Arkansas. To address this shortfall, the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) created the Initiative for Maximizing Student Development (IMSD) Program was created in 2009 to specifically provide a comprehensive start-to-finish mentoring and training program that includes 2 years of salary/tuition/fees support for UR students pursuing biomedical PhD degrees. The overall goals and objectives of the UAMS IMSD Program are (1) to enhance our success in retaining UR students and (2) to refine strategies to recruit additional UR students. Our specific, measurable objectives are to matriculate 6 UR doctoral students each year and to graduate 90% of these students. Specific Aim 1 is to matriculate 6 new UR doctoral students each year. In the year prior to implementation of the IMSD Program (2008), 10 of 91 (11%) domestic PhD applications were UR students. In the fall of 2022, 24.7% of domestic PhD applications to GPIBS and Pharmaceutical Sciences at UAMS were from UR students; this shows a significant increase from previous years. Specific Aim 2 is to retain and graduate 90% of the students in the UAMS IMSD Program. We will work to retain and graduate IMSD students by providing the preparation and support necessary for student success. We will provide support in numerous ways. First, we will enhance our PhD Summer Transition Program for matriculated IMSD doctoral students. The PhD Summer Transition Program will include new training in biomedical informatics and additional career and professional development workshops, along with workshops on mentoring, cultural competency, implicit bias, mindfulness, resilience, and health disparities research. We will create activities to enhance the communication skills of students, implement an Individual Development Plan (IDP), enhance our team-mentoring plan, and use IMSD students as mentors in a Near- Peer Mentoring Program. We will continue the peer mentoring program, faculty research seminar series, and student training on academic portfolios already implemented in the current IMSD program. Lastly, we will partner with UAMS and other T32 programs to expose IMSD students to training grant opportunities. Specific Aim 3 is to identify and further improve the program components that contributed to past program success, and disseminate the results. Program evaluation will be through a logic model, and results will be disseminated to the UAMS campus and other schools through the website, newsletters, presentations, and publications. Together, our proposed aims will contribute to the global recruitment, retention, and graduation of UR students at UAMS, ultimately helping to boost the number of UR faculty and investigators in the biomedical sciences serving Arkansas and the nation.

PROJECT NARRATIVE U.S. universities are unsuccessful at enrolling, retaining, and graduating underrepresented (UR) biomedical science (BS) students, creating a dearth of UR workforce. A diverse BS workforce will address health disparities via a more comprehensive, higher quality research agenda. The aims in this research training plan will increase the number of UR BS students, faculty, and researchers, thereby, serving Arkansas and the U.S.