Duke Receives $1.5 Million Grant to Establish Summer Institute for Under-Represented Minorities to Pursue Medical Careers

Duke University Medical Center
Friday, 12 May 2000

Medical school admissions directors face a continuing dilemma -- the nation's long-running economic expansion has lured many of the country's most talented students into such professions as business or law, resulting in a shrinking pool of the "best and brightest" applicants for medical schools.

Under-represented minorities (URM), who make up a small fraction of that pool, are as a group the hardest hit by the decline.

This worries Dr. Brenda Armstrong, director of admissions at the Duke University School of Medicine. While Duke's track record in attracting URMs to its medical school is one of the best in the country, there is a growing realization that in order to increase the numbers of URMs in future applicant pools, promising students must be identified and nurtured earlier in their education.

For that reason, Armstrong and colleagues developed a summer institute that has been funded by a five-year, $1.5 million grant from the Robert Wood Johnson (RWJ) Foundation, Princeton, N.J. Duke is providing $2.8 million in matching funds for the Duke University Summer Biomedical Science Institute, a Minority Medical Education Program. The program provides support for travel to and from the institute, room and board, books and supplies for participants.

The residential academic program for gifted under-represented minorities will open its doors in June 2001. It is expected that 125 college freshman, sophomores and juniors as well as a limited number of post-graduate students will participate each year.

The RWJ Foundation, in conjunction with the Association of American Medical Colleges, has funded eight such programs since 1988, including sites at Yale University, the University of Virginia, Baylor College of Medicine, Vanderbilt University, the University of Washington, Case Western Reserve University, the University of Alabama at Birmingham and the Consortium of Chicago Medical Schools. The foundation has provided funding for three additional universities this year: Duke, Columbia University and the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey Robert Wood Johnson School of Medicine.

"The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation program has shown that participating minority students were significantly more likely to be accepted to medical school than those who didn't participate," Armstrong said, citing a study published in the Sept. 2, 1998, edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

"While all the programs have similarities, each is unique in its own way," she said. "For example, our institute will be the first to offer a completely web-based curriculum which includes course work in advanced biology and chemistry, calculus and biophysics. The integration of course work over a web-based format will enable the students to experience the kind of academic environment typical of modern medical education."

Armstrong said the program will be an intensive experience whose goal is to prepare students to move ahead in their pre-medical preparation in academics, clinical exposure and other skills necessary to successfully compete for medical school acceptance. While on campus, the students will wear white coats and Duke badges identifying them as institute scholars, a distinction that is important for Armstrong.

"These are very bright kids whose talents have been identified early, and those in whom everything to date points to the potential for great achievement and success," she said. "We are here to help them realize their potential in medicine."

It is estimated that URMs -- African-Americans, Mexican-Americans, native Americans and mainland Puerto Ricans -- make up about 21 percent of the U.S. population, but less than 9 percent of U.S. physicians.

"It is important to train more physicians of color because we know that as a group they tend to return to their communities to practice medicine," Armstrong said. "These communities are typically populations at the greatest risk for negative outcomes from disease, and they present the greatest challenges to the health care system."

Institute faculty will be chosen from Duke Ph.D.s, many of whom are minorities. The resident advisers (RAs) in the dorms and the teaching assistants (TAs) will be drawn from the ranks of third-year medical students, many of whom will be minority students enrolled at Duke and other medical schools.

"The RAs and TAs provide very important reinforcement," Armstrong said. "Our medical students will provide role models in that they are tangible evidence of the success and productivity that URMs are enjoying at the nation's top-tier medical schools."

Currently, about 20 percent of students in Duke's school of medicine are URMs, and 95 percent graduate in four years or less -- among the highest rates in the country.

The institute will focus on courses in the basic sciences, oral and written communications, computer competency, opportunities for supervised patient contact, preparation for medical school entrance exams and ethical issues in medicine.

Institute scholars will be divided into two groups, each named after a minority who has made important contributions to medicine. The Dr. Daniel Hale Williams Scholars -- named after the African-American surgeon thought to have performed the first successful heart surgery in 1893 -- will be for those with introductory knowledge of the sciences. The more advanced students will follow the Dr. Rebecca Lee Crumpler track, named after the first African-American woman to receive a medical degree from a U.S. medical school.

Duke's Calvin Howell, associate professor of physics, is responsible for curriculum development and oversight and is one of the few African-American nuclear physicists in the country. He will be teaching physics at the institute.

"I have learned in my years of teaching that when students can accomplish something, it builds self-confidence," Howell said. "When they return to their home institution in the fall and can do complex physics problems easily, their self-confidence will be tremendously high. I believe in self-fulfilling prophecies -- if you can succeed, you will succeed."

For more information, or to contact Duke University Medical Center, see their website at: www.mc.duke.edu