Increasing Research Opportunities for Deaf and Hard‐of‐Hearing Students

Abstract

The National Institutes of Health has recognized deaf and hard‐of‐hearing students as an underrepresented group in science research by supporting the RIT‐RISE (Research Initiative for Scientific Enhancement) Scholars program. Students join our program at the end of their first year and engage in research during the academic year, full‐time summer research at RIT after year two, and then full‐time summer research at an affiliated campus after year three. Students and their mentors are supported for travel to the ABRCMS (Annual Biomedical Research Conference for Minority Students), as well as a discipline‐specific conference before they apply for Ph.D. schools in their fourth year. The program includes mentored research experiences and supplemental research training that prepares students to apply for and enter biomedical, biobehavioral and clinical science Ph.D. programs. Several unique courses and a co‐curricular program have been created to better prepare the scholars for research careers. We will describe our curriculum and our recruiting process, as well as steps that we have taken to address communication challenges in the research lab setting, which are distinct from challenges that are typically encountered in classrooms and teaching labs.Support or Funding InformationThis project is supported by NIH 1R25GM122672.This abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2019 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal.