history and overview	application information and download	eligibility

Since 1988, the Department of Pharmacology and former Alcohol Research Center (ARC) have recruited three to six students from underrepresented populations to carry out research with our faculty over a ten-week period during the summer. The 2008 Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship Program for Underrepresented Populations will be funded in part by the American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics (ASPET). This program provides undergraduate students with the opportunity to conduct research; present their results; attend seminars; and interact with fellow students, lab members, and faculty. Training in cellular and molecular pharmacology, signal transduction, neuropharmacology, biochemistry, and molecular structure, as well as opportunities in the blossoming field of bioinformatics, is available. Specific questions being researched focus on many areas including cancer biology, cell biology, alcohol and drugs of abuse, learning and memory, genomics, proteomics, lipid maps, and structural biology. A variety of state-of-the-art laboratory techniques including fluorescence microscopy, transgenics, gene chip arrays, NMR, mass spectrometry, computational pharmacology, and x-ray crystallography are used.

Our Summer Research Program was featured in the Winter 1999 issue of Winds of Change, an American Indian education and opportunity journal. In the article, Dr. Ty Reidhead, a Mandan Indian at the White River Indian Health Service in White River, Arizona, who was one of the first students accepted into the Summer Research Program, reflected upon his experience in the program. Dr. Reidhead said, "The work that I performed, and just the time that I spent that summer, proved to be a valuable and nearly essential part of my undergraduate education."

Since the inception of this program ninety-four students have been recruited. During the summer of 2006, the participating students were Akiko Komura, Melissa Lopez, Phoebe Tchoua, and Elizabeth Wasmuth. Ms. Komura received a BA with honors in Biochemistry from the University of Colorado, Boulder, in May 2007. Ms. Lopez is a senior at Colorado State University, Fort Collins, majoring in Biology. She is considering attending medical school after graduation. Ms. Tchoua graduated in 2006 from the University of West Georgia, Carrollton, Georgia, with a BA in Chemistry. She is planning on attending medical school in 2008. Ms. Wasmuth graduated in December 2006 with a BS in Animal Science from Cornell University, Ithica, New York. She has completed one-year fellowship at the National Institutes of Health/National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, Heritable Disorders Branch and is applying to graduate schools in Structural/Molecular Biology or Pharmacology.

In the summer 2007 program the participating students were Darryl Becenti, Lan Luong, Alexandra Palma, Carmen Sepulveda, and David Vargas. Mr. Becenti currently attends the Community College of Denver and plans to attend the University of Colorado, Denver. He majors in Premed. Ms. Luong, Ms. Sepulveda, and Mr. Vargas all attend the University of Colorado, Denver, and major in Biology. Ms. Palma attends Harvard College and is majoring in Human Evolutionary Biology.

Links:

  Aspiring Docs