Emerging Scholars
The Biology Department at Boston University is committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Evidence indicates that student retention, academic performance, and subsequent professional success are enhanced by diverse academic mentorship, implying that the lack of diversity among the faculty in many biology departments is a barrier to optimally training the next generation of biologists and biomedical professionals. Lack of representation is also detrimental to society as a whole since it reinforces and perpetuates entrenched racial inequalities.
The Biology faculty at BU are acutely aware of both the importance of increasing the diversity of lived experience represented by our faculty and the challenges of achieving that goal via traditional hiring approaches. Efforts to increase faculty diversity in the past have been hampered by the difficulty of Identifying a qualified candidate pool of black, indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) scholars. The Emerging Scholars in Integrative Biology Program will address this issue by identifying and developing relationships with outstanding biological scientists who are BIPOC earlier in their careers.
Our proposed program has three goals:
1. To identify a large number of outstanding postdoctoral BIPOC as a pool of potential future faculty recruits;
2. To create an annual opportunity for a select group of these emerging scholars to network with our faculty and students and become acquainted with our vibrant
department, university, and city, to attract their interest in joining our faculty in the future; and
3. To promote the transition of the scholars to successful faculty positions via a pair of workshops.
Prospective Scholar Program
The Prospective Scholar Program (PSP) in the Department of Biology at BU is a program designed to provide an overview of the graduate admissions process in Biology at BU. PSP participants will be matched with a current BU graduate student in Biology, who will assist participants with navigating the process to apply to graduate programs in Biology at BU (applications due in December). Participants will also be invited to a PSP recruitment event this fall, which will connect participants with other BU faculty and graduate students within Biology and affiliated departments, provide opportunities to meet one-on-one with prospective faculty mentors, introduce graduate student groups on campus, provide professional development resources, and facilitate discussions with participants and current graduate students on issues of diversity and inclusion, academic life, and living in Boston, among others.
The Biology PSP event will take place in Fall 2021 through Zoom. Applications to the PSP event are due by September 10, 2021. Prospective students from under-represented backgrounds in science are strongly encouraged to apply (here).