John R. La Montagne, deputy director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), died suddenly of a pulmonary embolism in his native Mexico City on 2 November 2004 at the age of 61. (See the NIH press release.) The longtime Alexandria, Virginia, resident dedicated his life to fighting disease, particularly influenza. For nearly ...
The Minorities in the Aquatic Sciences (MAS) Web site is an electronic storage and retrieval database targeted toward underrepresented minority students interested in the aquatic sciences. MAS is sponsored by the American Society of Limnology and Oceanography ( ASLO), as well as Hampton University in Virginia and Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, both of which have their own minority-ta...
Although many more students of color are pursuing graduate degrees in science and technology than 30 years ago, the stereotype that minorities aren't successful in these fields remains, according to LaMont Toliver, director of the Meyerhoff Scholars Program at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County (UMBC). UMBC President Freeman Hrabowski (left) created the program in 1988 to address the sho...
Whether it is the urge to explore a new discipline or an entirely new vocation, retraining is a necessary part of this shift. And while the path to do so may not be obvious--and sometimes even intimidating--it's often worth it.
The National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) supports a wide range of biomedical and behavioral research imperatives, and its Web site offers valuable program details to readers. One area of the site is devoted to the Division of Minority Opportunities in Research ( MORE), a NIGMS initiative to increase the number of underrepresented minority scientists by disseminating information ...
The Faces of Science: African Americans in Science is an Internet resource that showcases the achievements and state of African Americans in science, mathematics, engineering, and technology. This free Web site is the project of Princeton University's mathematics and physics librarian, Mitchell Brown. Its purpose is to introduce the user to the many African Americans who have made significant and...
PharMosaic is a pioneering program that recruits underrepresented minorities into pharmaceutical marketing careers. Pharmaceutical marketing is a growing field whose professionals often lack the ideal combination of business and scientific backgrounds. This problem is compounded by the lack of minority representation. PharMosaic is committed to combating both of these problems. The program is exe...
BACK TO THE FEATURE INDEX After 20 years at the nation's top nuclear research facility, Jill Trewhella isn't sure where she'll be the year after next. The former director of the bioscience division at New Mexico's Los Alamos National Laboratory left the lab this past May when she and her husband--who had been at Los Alamos for 30 years himself--headed for Salt Lake City and a year-long appointmen...
Editor's note: Clinton Parks continues his commentary on the defeat of Proposition 54, the controversial racial privacy initiative in California, with comments and a look at the initiative's future. We ended Part 1 of No on Proposition 54 with Ward Connerly condemning the University of California (UC), Berkeley, for its decision to admit over 400 mostly minority students with below average SAT sc...
Despite the fact that several paper-development programs still exist in college chemical engineering departments around the world, paper is a product that most people take for granted. But when it first occurred, the development of paper technology encouraged the development of science, mathematics, literature, and religion, among other pursuits. One African culture--ancient Egypt, or Kmt (pronou...
Editor's note: Part 2 of Clinton Parks's article, African and Caribbean Brain Drain, will appear on MiSciNet on Friday, 2 April 2004. T he Problem The success of Asian immigrants in science and engineering (S&E) in the U.S. is well publicized. However, the 1.6 million African and Caribbean immigrants (from 1960 to 1995)1 are a largely ignored part of the S&E workforce. Although their numbers are ...
Just Garcia Hill (JGH) is an online network for minorities in the biological sciences. The organization is named after three pioneering minority scientists: Ernest Everett Just, Rosa Minoka Hill, and Fabian Garcia (see box below). The organization's goals are to increase the representation of minority scientists in biology and to improve the well-being of minority communities. The JGH site is a v...
On 16 June, the House passed the appropriations bill for science, and the Departments of State, Justice, and Commerce (H.R. 2862) , which gives NSF's Education and Human Resources (EHR) department a $807 million budget for the 2006 fiscal year (FY) to recruit and train students for the science workforce. This is a reduction of 4.1% from FY 2005 and far below the FY 2004 budget of $944.0 million. ...
Cherie Butts, a postdoc at the National Institute of Mental Health, talks about her transition from undergraduate to graduate school at Johns Hopkins University.
Before desegregation in the nation's educational system, historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) were the only way that most African Americans could receive college degrees. Forty-nine years after the Supreme Court's Brown v. the Topeka Board of Education and 30 plus years after several landmark civil rights resolutions opened predominantly white institutions (PWIs) to African Americ...
The lack of minority scientists in this country has been well documented, and the aquatic sciences are no exception. For the first 53 years of the American Society of Limnology and Oceanography (ASLO), this racial neglect continued relatively unimpeded until Benjamin Cuker (pictured left) created the ASLO Minorities Program in 1989. Dissatisfied with his field's white male, "old boy" network, he ...
Throughout the United States, there are only 32 African-American computer science (CS) professors. Of the 32, three have positions at the Computer Science and Software Engineering (CSSE) department at Auburn University in Alabama. Those three professors, Gerry Dozier, Juan Gilbert, and Cheryl Seals, talked about their educational backgrounds, how they came to Auburn, and how they have increased t...
BACK TO THE FEATURE INDEX Funding is essential to any research effort. The proliferation of available monies--as well as qualified researchers--in today's scientific community has made it difficult to wade through the wealth of available information. That's where the Community of Science Inc. ( COS) comes into the picture. Based in Baltimore, Maryland, COS manages databases of science grants and ...
