The Great Diseases: Bridging biomedical career exploration, competency building and mentoring
Grant # R25 GM137369-01
This program is funded by a Science Education Partnership Award from the National Institutes of Health.
The scope of the SEPA program is to support the development and study of model biomedical science partnerships that focus on health-related sciences to broaden participation is related careers.
The purpose of this program is to draw on a long-standing partnerships between local schools, teachers and the CSE to create innovative opportunities for high school students to explore life-relevant health-related careers while building critical competencies. The overarching goal is to increase student interest in health-science related careers through opportunities that build critical self-perceptions and career awareness.
In this SEPA project has three phases that leverage considerable work and infrastructure built with The Great Diseases, Teaching the Great Diseases and BioScann projects. More specifically the project aims to:
Phase 1: Create and evaluate three new BioScann cases to build career awareness in science classrooms in partnership with Boston Public School teachers. We expected this to reach approximately 2K students. Students from this cohort will also be recruit for Phase 3.
Phase 2: Create and evaluate online pre-college, dual-enrollment courses in partnership with Boston Public School teachers. These will create advance learning opportunities for students with limited access to such expenses. They will focus on current biomedical topics and will emphasize college-readiness skill-building, specifically for online learning. We expected this to reach approximately 1K students.
Phase 3: Create and evaluate a new near-peer mentorship and residential program. Working with undergraduate students from the Tufts Center for STEM Diversity, we will bring Boston students from Phase 1 to Tufts for a summer program called Tufts Mini-Medical School. Each undergraduate mentor will also gain a summer lab internship and they will lead college-readiness workshops for the the high school students year-round.