Grant expands UB’s graduate pathways for Puerto Rican STEM students

The longstanding STEM graduate program pipeline between UB and the University of Puerto Rico at Cayey will continue and expand to include more institutions, thanks to a $500,000 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

The funding builds upon a $250,000 seed grant that supported 14 UPR Cayey undergraduates to conduct summer research at UB in 2022 and 2023. Students who successfully completed the program were offered admission to a science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) graduate program at UB.

This new grant will expand the partnership to Texas A&M University, another U.S. mainland R1 institution (very high research activity), and two more Puerto Rican undergraduate institutions: Inter American University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo and Inter American University of Puerto Rico at Bayamon. 

Hispanic adults earned just 9% of STEM master’s degrees and 6% of STEM research doctorates from 2010-18, despite accounting for 16% of U.S. adults, according to the PEW Research Center. They also accounted for just 8% of all U.S. STEM jobs.

“Our hope is that this expansion will increase traditionally marginalized students’ opportunities and pathways to STEM graduate programs,” says the grant’s co-principal investigator, Luis A. Colón, SUNY Distinguished Professor and A. Conger Goodyear Professor in the Department of Chemistry and associate dean for inclusive excellence, College of Arts and Sciences. “It is important that the enrollment of Latinx and Afro-Latinx in STEM graduate programs better reflects the population of the United States.”  

Since joining UB in 1993, Colón, a graduate of UPR Cayey and Puerto Rico native, has helped recruit dozens of students from the U.S. territory to come to Buffalo. Thirty-eight Hispanic students have earned advanced degrees in chemistry, mostly PhDs, while more than 100 Hispanic students have participated in the summer research program.  

For these efforts, Colón received the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring from then-President Barack Obama and the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s (AAAS) 2024 Lifetime Mentor Award.

In the past, the UB-UPR Cayey partnership was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation. The Sloan Foundation seed grant received in 2022 built on and formalized these efforts.

With the latest Sloan grant, undergraduate students from the three Puerto Rican institutions will conduct summer research at either UB or Texas A&M, as well as undertake a series of academic enhancement and professional development activities prior to and during the program.

The grant will also allow the program to create a web presence for networking and continued engagement of student scholars, as well as initiate bridge funding to alleviate financial burden as students transition to graduate school. 

In addition, a course will be permanently established at UPR Cayey on preparing students for summer research and entering graduate programs. The class will incorporate diversity, equity and inclusion issues and cultural differences.

“Moreover, a community of undergraduate scholars will be created that can serve as mentors to the new generation of students,” Colón says.

In addition to Colón, other co-principal investigators include Luis De Jesús Báez, assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry and a UPR Cayey graduate, and Wilfredo Resto, professor of chemistry at UPR Cayey.

Other members of the team include Sarbajit Banerjee, professor of chemistry and materials science and engineering at Texas A&M; Rosamil Rey, associate dean for academic affairs at IAU Bayamón; and Jerry Cartagena, assistant professor of chemistry at IAU Arecibo. Rey and Cartagena both hold PhDs in chemistry from UB.