All Times EDT
Keywords: undergraduate, diversity, data science, research, education
In 2015, funded by the NIH, California State University, Monterey Bay (CSUMB) began the development of several programs to support undergraduate training in biomedical data science. The programs include new majors, concentrations, and minors relevant to biomedical data science and professional and research training for undergraduate students and faculty at CSUMB. In addition, we began a collaborative summer research program with the Genomics Institute at the University of California, Santa Cruz. We will present the evaluation of the first four years of the program and the impact of collaboration between a primarily undergraduate institution and a primarily research institution to support student success in biomedical data science. We will provide case studies and data on the impact of academic, professional, and personal support developed specifically for our program to support first-generation and underrepresented groups to pursue graduate studies in biomedical data science. Specifically, we will present program-specific structures that support students “late” in their undergraduate careers who want to pursue graduate education in biomedical data science and our plans to institutionalize the new structures through programs and coursework. The institutionalization of the proposed structures will allow us to recruit more first-generation and underrepresented students into the data science graduate programs and careers.