The University of California, Riverside has received a five-year grant totaling $2.4 million from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) to fund a project aimed at addressing the challenges to STEM success faced by some students — particularly, students from underrepresented minority groups at UC Riverside. The principal investigator of the grant is Susan Wessler, an IIGB member and distinguished professor of genetics in Botany & Plant Sciences.

Specifically, the grant will allow the project, titled “Sustaining Academic Leadership for STEM Achievement” (HHMI-SALSA), to provide lower division science students with early research immersion as well as career exploration and mentoring, using an already successful first-year “learning community” program at UCR as the feeder pipeline. Those students successfully retained through the lower division will be handed off into upper division research, internship and career opportunities.

The research immersion will be accomplished through increased student participation in the popular “Dynamic Genome” course—a hands-on bioinformatics lab course already being taught in UCR’s Neil A. Campbell Science Learning Laboratory, in which freshmen are the first to analyze mobile DNA or transposable elements in plant genomes.

Currently, the Dynamic Genome course is offered in nine sections each year. HHMI-SALSA will increase the number of sections to 24 over the next five years (one new section added per quarter), allowing nearly 600 students—more than one-third of incoming CNAS students—to take the course. Other CNAS faculty, whose research labs use a variety of model organisms — the fruit fly, roundworm, fungi—to address current biological problems, will be involved in teaching the new sections at the Neil A. Campbell Science Learning Laboratory.

According to Wessler, the holder of a University of California President’s Chair, the timing of the grant is ideal because a National Science Foundation STEP grant UCR received last year has increased the capacity of the learning communities, which help generate the Dynamic Genome course students. In combination with this NSF grant, the HHMI-SALSA grant will give UCR greater capacity for critical programmatic enhancements to help retain undergraduate students in STEM majors.