I believe this is a normal part of the budget making process, and I am sure happens very often to other public universities. The politicians are under pressure to cut spending and the university probably seems a better target than other agencies. In response, the university President, and eventually faculty, staff, and students, have to argue and lobby for support. What is worrisome is the effect further budget cuts will have on the quality of the education and research activities in the university. What is needed is that those who benefit from the University (and I would argue, *ALL* Puerto Ricans benefit) demonstrate their support. By contacting their representatives in government, by speaking out in favor of the University, and by making donations to their alma mater (a very effective mechanism for transformative change at many higher learning institutions around the world).

University of California, San Francisco Department of Medicine Residency Diversity Committee Visiting Elective Scholarship Program (VESP) The Visiting Elective Scholarship Program supported by the UCSF Department of Medicine’s Residency Diversity Committee was established to provide scholarship support to fourth year medical students who are underrepresented in medicine interested in applying to the UCSF Department of Medicine’s clinical electives. The scholarship program is designed to:  Expose fourth year medical students who are underrepresented in medicine to an academic internal medicine training program  Promote student interest in applying to an academic internal medicine training program  Provide faculty and house staff mentorship during the clinical elective experience  Make good faith efforts to have an all inclusive pool of qualified applicants Clinical electives are four weeks in length and are available, space permitting, to U.S. visiting students. VESP participants are assigned a faculty advisor and have the opportunity to network with UCSF Department of Medicine faculty, housestaff and students. A diversity dinner with faculty and house staff is held during each rotation. In addition all participants are invited and encouraged to attend various seminars including monthly Medical Effectiveness Research Center for Diverse Populations (MERC) seminars, Department of Medicine Grand Rounds and others. VESP participation is not affiliated with the internal medicine residency match program and participation in the Program does not guarantee a spot in the match. WHO CAN APPLY?  Fourth year U.S. medical students who are underrepresented in medicine are encouraged to apply.  Student must be in good academic standing at an accredited US medical school  Requirements for the Department of Medicine’s clinical electives must also be met o 4th year standing o completion of all core clerkships in medicine, surgery, pediatrics, psychiatry and OB-Gyn APPLICATION  Completed VESP application (see attached)  Letter of recommendation from a faculty member in Internal Medicine (can be the same as the letter submitted to the Department of Medicine’s clinical elective program)  A personal statement of up to 1,500 words.  An official academic transcript  Recent CV APPLICATION (cont)  Students must also apply to the Department of Medicine’s clinical elective program UCSF School of Medicine Visiting Student Info: http://www.medschool.ucsf.edu/visitingstudents/general/ SELECTION Fifteen scholarships ($1,500 each, to be used toward visiting student elective fees, transportation costs and room and board) will be available for the 2006-07 academic year. Scholarships will be awarded on the basis of:  Academic achievement as indicated by transcripts, letter of recommendation, etc  Leadership  Interest in pursuing a career in internal medicine, especially academic internal medicine  Interest in serving underserved populations DEADLINE: Rolling deadline. Applications accepted April 15th 2006 through July 15th 2006. Application must be received 10 weeks prior to the elective start date. MORE INFORMATION For further information about Visiting Elective Scholarship Program or to receive an application, please contact: Visiting Elective Scholarship Program Rene Salazar, MD UCSF Division of General Internal Medicine 400 Parnassus, Box 0320 San Francisco, CA 94143-0320 email: salazarr@medicine.ucsf.edu Also visit the following websites: UCSF School of Medicine Visiting Student Info: http://www.medschool.ucsf.edu/visitingstudents/general/ UCSF Department of Medicine Residency Diversity Committee: http://medicine.ucsf.edu/rrc/ UCSF Department of Medicine Website: http://medicine.ucsf.edu/ UCSF Medical Effectiveness Research Center for Diverse Populations http://dgim.ucsf.edu/diversity/

We just uploaded the newly organized "Resource" section. We are building the different subsections, so you will see an improvement in each of the subsections soon. One of the things we are really excited about is, under "Science education=>undergraduate students" we are uploading what probably is the most extensive list of summer research programs for undergraduate students available on the internet. Odmara Barreto-Chang spent a ton of time compiling this mega list, which we hope will be a great resource to our younger users. We are also preparing a similar list summer research programs for highschool students.

We are going to add this list to the resource section soon, but in the meantime, here is a list of awesome research and career development funding resources: Burroughs Wellcome Fund Next Deadline: Sep 01, 2006. Supports biomedical researchers at the beginning of their careers (except for Translational Research awards, which are for established physician-scientists) in areas of science that are underfunded and poised for significant advance. Current solicitations include: Career Awards at the Scientific Interface (5/1/06), Clinical Scientist Awards in Translational Research (9/1/06); Career Awards in the Biomedical Sciences (deadline, 10/2/06); Investigators in Pathogenesis of Infectious Disease (11/1/06); See http://www.bwfund.org/programs/index.html for details. Contact: Martin Ionescu-Pioggia Email: info@bwfund.org CFDA Number:N/A Cystic Fibrosis Foundation Next Deadline: Sep 06, 2006. Supports individuals interested in careers related to CF research & care. Student Traineeships (no deadline) provide $1,500 to entering doctoral students or senior-level undergraduates who plan to pursue graduate training. Clinical Fellowships are also available: first & second year deadline is first Wednesday in October; third & fourth year deadline is first Wednesday in September . See http://www.cff.org/research/cystic_fibrosis_foundation_grants/ for details. Contact: Monica Last, Manager E-mail: Grants@cff.org CFDA Number:N/A Foundation for Digestive Health and Nutrition Next Deadline: Sep 05, 2006. Supports basic & clinical research & young investigator research career development in areas related to gastroenterology & hepatology. Awards go to students, medical residents, & postdoctoral professionals at every level of their careers. Approximately $2 million in research funds are disbursed each year in 12 categories. Applications for all awards must be submitted electronically. Deadlines vary by program (1/14, 3/5, 3/21, 9/5). See http://www.fdhn.org/html/awards/elect_app.html for details. Contact: Lauryn Barry, Manager E-mail: info@fdhn.org CFDA Number:N/A Foundation for Physical Therapy Next Deadline: Aug 15, 2006. Supports 4 areas: Florence P. Kendall (formerly Mary McMillan Doctoral Scholarship) provides $5,000 to physical therapists in their 1st yr of doctoral study (8/15); Promotion of Ph.D. Studies Scholarships provide $7,500 for the coursework phase, or $15,000 for the postcandidacy phase of postprofessional Ph.D. studies (1/17); New Investigator Fellowship Training Init. provides up o $30,000 to help train Ph.D. prepared physical therapists as developing researchers (no new info); & Research Grants provide $40,000 to evaluate the effectiveness of physical therapy interventions (8/15). See http://www.apta.org//AM/Template.cfm?Section=Home for updates.CFDA Number:N/A Contact: Victoria Matthews, Scientific Program Administrator 800/875-1378 (ext. 8505) Leukemia and Lymphoma Society Next Deadline: Sep 15, 2006. Offers 4 progs for clinical, basic, & translational research on leukemia, lymphoma, Hodgkin's disease, & myeloma. Scholars Prog ($110,000/yr over 5 yrs); Scholar in Clinical Research Program ($110,000/yr over 5 yrs); Special Fellows Program ($60,000/yr over 3 yrs); & Fellows Program ($50,000/yr over 3 yrs). Eligibility varies by prog. Ddln refers to required online prelim. proposals. Full apps are due by 10/2. See http://www.leukemia-lymphoma.org/all_page?item_id=11618 for details. E-mail: Contact: Director of Research Administration researchprograms@lls.org CFDA Number:N/A Lymphoma Research Foundation Next Deadline: Jul 01, 2006. Supports research to eradicate lymphoma via 2 mechanisms. 2-yr Postdoc Fellowships fund laboratory or clinic-based research that is relevant to the trtmt, diagnosis, or prevention of lymphoma. Interests: etiology, immunology, genetics, therapies, & transplantation. Eligibility is limited to MDs & PhDs who have completed 2 yrs of a fellowship, & jr. faculty at or below the level of asst. professor. 3-yr. Clinical Investigator Career Development Grants fund training of clinicians to help develop new therapeutics & diagnostic tools. Deadline refers to required LOIs. Applications due 9/8. See http://www.lymphoma.org/ for details. E-mail: Contact: Director of Research researchgrants@lymphoma.org CFDA Number:N/A Cancer Prevention Fellowship Program Next Deadline: Sep 01, 2006. Supports state-of-the-art postdoctoral research training in cancer prevention & control. Designed to attract individuals from various health science disciplines into cancer prevention & control research. Supports up to 15 individuals for 3-year periods--2 years at NCI & one year spent at an NCI-supported cancer prevention & control program. Candidates must have an MD, DDS, DrPH or PhD in an appropriate field. Also supports Master of Public Health training at schools of public health, & a specialty track in the ethics of public health & prevention. See http://www3.cancer.gov/prevention/pob/ Contact: Douglas L. Weed E-mail: cpfpcoordinator@mail.nih.gov CFDA Number:93.399 Pharmaceutical Research Manufacturers of America Foundation Fellowships, Awards, and GrantsNext Deadline: Sep 01, 2006. Supports young MDs, PhDs, and medical students in disciplines important to the pharmaceutical industry. Multiple fellowships and grants are available in the areas of pharmacology, toxicology, health outcomes, informatics, morphology, and pharmaceutics. Pre-doctoral and postdoctoral fellowships, sabbatical fellowships, and research starter grants are available. Applications may be submitted online. Deadlines of 9/1 & 10/1 vary by discipline. See http://www.phrmafoundation.org/ for details.CFDA Number:N/A Contact: Eileen McCarron, Director of Development 202/572-7756 International Human Frontier Science Program Organization Next Deadline: Aug 31, 2006. Promotes interdisciplinary research focused on complex mechanisms of living organisms. Areas of interest: brain functions & molecular approaches to biological functions. Research Grant Program . (LOI 3/30/06), including Young Investigators' & Program Grants, supports international science team projects. Long-Term (8/31/06) & Short-Term Fellowships (no deadline) allow scientists to work in foreign laboratories, with focus on early career individuals. New cross-disciplinary fellowship has 8/31/06 app ddln. See http://www.hfsp.org/how/appl_forms_LTF.php for updates. Contact: Armelle Schmitt-Koukoui, E-mail: grant@hfsp.org CFDA Number:N/A Agency: Sloan (Alfred P.) Foundation Next Deadline: Sep 15, 2006 Provides 116 two-year awards of $45,000 to stimulate fundamental research by promising young PhD scholars in chemistry, computer science, economics, mathematics, neuroscience, & physics. Candidates must be faculty members at a college or university and nominated by department heads or other senior scholars. Must also be no more than six years from completion of the most recent PhD as of the year of the nomination. See http://www.sloan.org/programs/scitech_fellowships.shtml Contact: Michael Teitelbaum E-mail: teitelbaum@sloan.org CFDA Number:N/A American Lung Association Nationwide Research Program. Next Deadline: Sep 01, 2006. Provides training & seed grants in lung disease & general lung biology for researchers, mostly in early stages of careers. Several grants are supported, including: Lung Health Dissertation Grant; Biomedical Research Grant; Career Investigator Award; Clinical Patient Care Research Grant; & Senior Research Training Fellowship. All have a 9/1 deadline. See http://www.lungusa.org/site/pp.asp?c=dvLUK9O0E&b=486859 for details. Must register online for access to program details & application.Contact:Evita Mendoza, emendoza@lungusa.org CFDA Number:N/A American Philosophical Society Daland Fellowships in Clinical Investigation. Next Deadline: Sep 01, 2006. Provides $50,000/year for two years in support of patient-oriented research in internal medicine, neurology, psychiatry, pediatrics, & surgery. Candidates must include a letter of nomination from their department chair & are must have held an MD or MD/PhD for less than eight years. Preference is for applicants with less than two years' -postdoctoral training. Foreign nationals must provide assurance that direct contact with patients in the US will be authorized. All research must be performed under the supervision of a scientific advisor. See http://www.amphilsoc.org/grants/ for details. Contact: Linda Musumeci E-mail: LMusumeci@amphilsoc.org CFDA Number:N/A

It was my posting, sorry I forgot to put the reference in the english version. The reference is in the Spanish version of the article, which was published in El Nuevo Dia (Por Marga Parés Arroyo / end.mpares@elnuevodia.com )

Camille, gracias por tu opinion. Con respecto a lo que preguntas, en PR creo que hay varios recursos para estudiants de secundaria, incluyendo el programa de Ciencia sobre ruedas que corre desde Mayaguez (http://sonw.uprm.edu/sonw/). Ellos dan presentaciones a estudiantes e escuela secundaria y es un programa a mi entender excelente. Tu escuela los podria invitar. Tambien hay un programa, cuyo enlace tenemos en al seccion de recursos, llamado Alacima, pero creo que trabajan mas con profesores que con estudiantes, pero deberias visitar su pagina para ver lo que hacen. Como menciona Veronica, aqui en CienciaPR nos interesa mucho desarrollar un programa de mentoria. Estamos trabajando ese programa ahora, y si tu, o amistades tuyas, le interesa participar deberias comunicarte directamente con Veronica o a traves de este message board. Una tercera alternativa, en lo que montamos el programa de mentoria, es que si tus profesores se animan a invitar a miembros de CienciaPR, estoy seguro lograrian que personas visiten la escuela y den charlas sobre su carrera en la ciencia. Lo que podrias hacer es hablar con tus profesores para arreglar la asembla en la escuela, y a traves de esta pagina podemos conseguir los voluntarios que visiten tu escuela. Gracias por tu entusiasmo y por todas tus ideas!!

Camille, Thanks so much for letting us know how you would like CienciaPR to contribute to your academic development. This is exactly the kind of input we need- many thanks for your honest feedback! In fact, CienciaPR has been thinking about figuring out a way to efficiently launch a mentoring program. As part of such a program, someone in the early stages of their career, someone like you, would be matched with a member that has been where you are now and therefore be able to mentor you through most of the unknowns-including the questions you expressed in your post. How does such a program sound to you? Would it be helpful? (Camille, tell your friends about this initiative- they might be able to benefit from such a program as well!) If any of you CienciaPR members out there are interested in mentoring a fellow student- please send me an e-mail through the link in my profile page. Also, Camille's post underscores the possibility of recruiting members to volunteer and maybe go to schools close to where they reside (after contacting and making arrangements with the school in question of course) and give a short talk about what they do for a living etc. This might give high school students an early idea of what you can do with a degree in the sciences. How about if you are a member that does not reside in PR but goes to visit regularly? It seems to me that paying a visit to the closest high school in the area you go visit (after contacting and making arrangements with the school in question) would probably not take a lot of time and will prove to be incredibly rewarding. Even if you do not go to the island and visit- you can serve as a mentor for CienciaPR! Let's share with others the practical knowledge we have "gathered" along the way! Thanks again Camille! Veronica

Dr Rinaldi, Thanks for the insightful comments. Two thoughts come immediately to mind: 1) Do you (or other people in CienciaPR for that matter) think it would be useful if CienciaPR helped organize an IP workshop, bringing lawyers who have expertice in IP, scientistswith succesfully patented innovative technologies, and venture capitalists to speak to P Rican researchers about how to go from an idea to an IPO? I know in the Bay Area UCSF, Stanford, Berkeley, etc have similar courses. One of our advantages in this site is that we have non-scientists (lawers, VC) who are interested in science and PR and might be interested in participating in this conference and contributing their expetice. These courses might be offered in PR already for all I know, but if so, maybe we can do something through this site to help guide entrepeneurial scientists interested in these topics. 2) Regarding the other points, some scientists at CAPRI were interested in identifying what scienstits in PR thought were the biggest roadblocks to conducting research in the archipelago. We thought that as a community, we could combine forces and help bring some of these concerns to the attention of the people working to fix them. If you, or anybody else in this forum, is interested in actively participating in this survey CAPRI is about to conduct, I invite you to contact Adelfa Serrano or Mariano Garcia Blanco. You can find their information in the CienciaPR directory.

The issue of intellectual property generation in academia is an interesting one and subject to much debate. It has been raised at almost every technical conference I have attended in Puerto Rico. Let us start with a hard fact: with the exception of a few institutions, most universities engaged in generating and licensing/commercializing their intellectual property don’t make a profit. Still, having a patent can help in establishing research and development collaborations with industrial partners, as I have been told by faculty colleagues from other institutions. I tried to submit a disclosure recently, but the IP Office at the UPR did not come to a concrete decision regarding whether to proceed with the disclosure or not. In that particular case the process had complications arising from mine and my colleague's ignorance of IP laws when researchers from different institutions collaborate (you need a non-disclosure agreement, otherwise the actual inception of the patentable idea becomes prior art against the patent!). So I would say that it is necessary for our faculty to be better trained in these aspects. That said, it is also important for the IP Office to come to decisions in a timely manner, as research-active faculty at UPR have more pressing challenges to face (more below). Now we come to the issue of whether generating IP should be an essential role of academic researchers. I believe it should be, but it should not bear the highest priority. Generating patents is a measure of the research productivity of an academic institution, but it is not the primary metric by a long shot. The primary metric is research expenditures, brought in through externally funded grants. Another hard fact: A simple check at the National Science Foundation website (www.nsf.gov) shows that the University of Puerto Rico *system* has 57 active NSF grants. That is 56 grants across the 11 campuses (for those who are counting: 9 through the Resource Center for Science and Engineering, 25 in Mayaguez, 2 in Ciencias Medicas, 6 in Humacao, and 14 in Rio Piedras). If you check them one by one you will see many of these grants are for educational purposes, hence they don't count as a measure of research productivity. I doubt we are faring much better in the other Federal funding agencies (could someone post how many NIH R01’s the UPR currently has?). For comparison, MIT has 422 active NSF grants, most of them for research. I make the comparison to MIT because it is one example of an institution that makes a profit from intellectual property. I will leave it to the reader to make comparisons to the university of his or her choice (simply enter the instution's name and select active awards at http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/). Now, one could argue that the reason MIT (and other similar institutions) is so successful at generating patents is because of its large research budget. One would be tempted to estimate the number of patents UPR should "realistically" be submitting based on its relative research expenditures with respect to MIT (or any other institution). I have actually heard an IP lawyer in Puerto Rico raise this argument. The fundamental flaw in the argument is that the relation between patent production and research expenditures is not linear as supposed. Generating intellectual property requires carrying out innovative research. As anyone actually *engaged* in innovative research can tell, this requires a lot of supporting infrastructure such as state-of-the-art instrumentation, skilled technicians, and access to the most recent scholarly publications, not to mention laboratory and office space for students and faculty. The establishment and upkeep of such infrastructure does not scale linearly with external funds either. Take postdoctoral research associates as an example. If funded through NSF it is highly unlikely that a Principal Investigator in a standard grant will have the funds necessary to pay for such an assistant. In fact, even a medium collaborative research project (in the order of $1M) will not provide the necessary funds. To be able to support postdocs using NSF funds you need larger infrastructure or center scale grants (we have two in Puerto Rico – the EPSCoR RII and a CREST – both through sheltered funds programs). Similar arguments apply to the acquisition of shared instrumentation facilities (such as electron microscopy, etc.). I would then argue that owing to the UPR’s relatively small research budget (and the lack of local government support – but that is a subject for another day) we currently do not have the supporting infrastructure required to carry out the innovative research that generates patents at a rate comparable to other institutions (and States). I am confident this will soon change, through the hard work of UPR researchers and administrators.