PROJECT SUMMARY
Modifiable behavioral factors, including tobacco use, alcohol consumption, diet, exercise, and sun exposure,
account for up to 75% of cancer cases and figure prominently in response to treatments and risk of relapse. In
addition, heightened risk for cancer, as well as the diagnosis and treatment of cancer, often come with significant
harms to psychological functioning and quality of life, which in turn may adversely affect cancer outcomes.
Despite decades of research on behavioral aspects of cancer prevention and control (BCPC), many individuals
continue to engage in risky behaviors, and many continue to bear the considerable psychological burdens
associated with cancer risk, diagnosis, treatment and survival. Major barriers to continued progress in this area
include: 1) the relatively small fraction of scientists who focus their work on BCPC, 2) a lack of awareness of
BCPC career opportunities when college students consider their advanced educational options, 3) a lack of
opportunities to receive formal early training in BCPC research, and 4) a lack of stewardship of outstanding
college students to help them transition from research labs to successful graduate education. Moreover, BCPC
scientists are increasingly unprepared to tackle the unique behavioral and psychological challenges faced by an
increasingly culturally diverse population. The program aims to address these critical training gaps by providing
15-week immersive summer research, mentoring, and career development experiences for outstanding
undergraduates (n=16/summer) from the City University of New York (CUNY), the largest urban university
system in the U.S. With all of its eleven senior colleges federally-designated minority-serving institutions, the
diverse and talented CUNY student body provides an ideal pool of dedicated, promising young scholars to benefit
from the proposed program. We will match outstanding students with behavioral scientists from CUNY's Hunter
College (HC), or the nearby Center for Behavioral Oncology at the renowned Icahn School of Medicine at Mount
Sinai (ISMMS), with which HC maintains close collaborations. The program will go beyond simple summer lab
experiences, offering collaborative multidisciplinary idea-generation projects, biweekly career development
meetings as a cohort, creating opportunities for students to develop lasting relationships with experts in the field,
as well as future colleagues, and provide critical transitional mentoring during the process of applying for
graduate education. Connecting with the next generation of scientists from an early stage and shepherding them
through the challenging transition from undergraduate to advanced education is a critical step supporting the
continuity of trainees' development that is all too often ignored. We will also leverage the considerable resources
of HC's larger NIH-funded Cancer Health Disparities Partnership, which will provide scaffolding and infrastructure
to efficiently execute the program. Finally, we will conduct ongoing, rigorous multifocal outcome evaluations to
determine the effectiveness of the program and make real-time programmatic adjustments as needed.
