Cultivating a Sustainable Neuroscience Research-Intensive Community to Build Equity - Strategies to “stop leaks” from a “diversity pipeline” based on faculty mentoring and ‘1-on-1 research apprenticeship’ lack scalability and sustainability to serve sufficient numbers of underrepresented undergraduates to achieve equity in the Neuroscience professoriate. Scarcities in research opportunities and faculty mentoring has disparate impacts on recruitment, selection, and retention in research labs; these are not manifestations of an unmet need to remediate deficits of underrepresented students, but an unmet need for a new research education model. The overall objective of this program is to create a self-sustaining Neuroscience Research-Intensive Community that: i) removes economic, institutional, and cultural barriers to undergraduate research opportunities; ii) provides graduate students and postdocs the professional leadership skills needed to succeed in academia; and, iii) cultivates a diverse multi-level research community dedicated to the success of its members. By coupling diverse teams of undergraduates seeking research opportunities with graduate students seeking leadership opportunities, a team of underrepresented faculty at Texas A&M University, College Station replaced the 1-on-1 mentoring model with a team-based model based on asset models and leadership. Within 5 years of implementation as an undergraduate biomedical research certificate program and as a graduate research leadership program, the model proved to be scalable, sustainable, and inclusive. The resulting infrastructure supported more than 1,200 students in AY 2019-2020, 41% of whom were underrepresented. The Texas A&M Institute of Neurosciences (TAMIN) will leverage this proven model to achieve the objectives by pursuing three specific aims: 1) Structure a community-based, large-scale Neuroscience Undergraduate Research Program that unlocks access to TAMIN labs; 2) Create a Neuroscience Research Leadership Program to prepare graduate students in TAMIN labs to lead diverse research teams and teach inclusive course-based undergraduate research experiences; and 3) Create a Neuroscience Research Directors Program to prepare postdoctoral scholars to lead diverse research labs and direct research education programs that build equity. By integrating courses, research experiences, and mentoring, overlapping leadership-based programs cross boundaries which segregates scholars at different career stages. The result will be an organic transition of an underrepresented undergraduate, who has not yet committed to a research career, to a faculty member, who leads diverse research labs and administers research education programs. The positive impacts of this proposal include: a) a diverse community that becomes self-sustaining after 5 years and trains a cohort of at least 3 post- docs, 36 graduate students and 144 undergraduates per year; b) an innovative training program that integrates recruitment, mentoring, professional development, and career transition from freshman to faculty; and, c) the empowerment of underrepresented change agents who propagate an innovative equity-building Neuroscience Research-Intensive Community across the nation.
