The Howard Hughes Medical Institute has announced a five-year, $7.75 million initiative in partnership with Pennsylvania State University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County to replicate a successful model for advancing diversity in the sciences.

The Meyerhoff Adaptation Project will work to adapt UMBC's Meyerhoff Scholars Program — which for twenty-five years has successfully prepared underrepresented minority students for STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) careers — at Penn State and UNC. At UMBC, the program is built around a complex set of interventions, ranging from recruitment and summer bridge programs to intensive mentoring, collaborative learning, and multiple research experiences. The institutions participating in the initiative will explore how each component of the Meyerhoff model contributes to the program's overall success; gather data about how students study and collaborate, how the university communities around them contribute, and whether students face similar challenges and pressures at each school; and document, assess, and share what they learn with other universities.

Although African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans represent 30 percent of the U.S. population, they account for only 9 percent of those in the scientific workforce. At UMBC, alumni of the Meyerhoff Program had, as of May 2014, earned 144 Ph.D. degrees, 39 M.D./Ph.D. degrees, one D.V.M./Ph.D. degree, 239 master's degrees, and 107 M.D. degrees. Indeed, more African-American undergraduates at UMBC go on to earn a Ph.D. in a STEM field than at any other predominantly white university.

"We are fortunate to be partnered with UMBC, Penn State, and HHMI in this exciting effort to adapt the Meyerhoff Program to our campus," said Joseph Templeton, vice chair of education and Francis Preston Venable Professor of Chemistry at UNC, where the grant will be used to expand and enhance the Chancellor's Science Scholars program. "Using the Meyerhoff Program as a model, we want to improve the STEM experience among all populations at Carolina so our students have an abundance of twenty-first century tools to lead future scientific endeavors."