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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 was 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 nearly 100 students have been recruited. In the summer 2007 program the participating students were Darryl Becenti, Lan Luong, Alexandra Palma, Carmen Sepulveda, and David Vargas. Mr. Becenti is currently a premed student at the University of Colorado Denver. Ms. Luong graduated from the University of Colorado Denver in May 2008 with a BS in biology and is starting Pharmacy School at UCD this fall. Ms. Palma graduated in June 2008 from Harvard University with a BA in human evolutionary biology and plans to attend medical school in 2009. Ms. Sepulveda will graduate in December 2008 from the University of Colorado Denver with a BS in biology and also plans on attending medical school in 2009. Mr. Vargas is starting his senior year at the University of Colorado Denver, majoring in biology.

The 2008 participating students were Rachel Cave, Claudia Corona, Chidebele Duru, Jason Smith, and Abel Zemichael. Ms. Cave is a chemistry major at Allegheny College in Meadville, PA. Ms. Corona majors in science at the Community College of Denver. Ms. Duru and Mr. Smith both attend the Metropolitan State College of Denver. Ms. Duru majors in health care management and chemistry, and Mr. Smith majors in biology. Mr. Zemichael majors in science at the Community College of Aurora.

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