Biomedical Research Abroad: Vistas Open (BRAVO!)

Biomedical Research Abroad: Vistas Open (BRAVO!)
A Program to Prepare Science Students for the 21^st Century

Carol Bender, Director Undergraduate Biology Research Program and
Biomedical Research Abroad: Vistas Open! Program

The University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ 85721

The nation's Research I Universities serve a vital role in educating the next generation of research scientists. By training undergraduate students in research laboratories, we prepare young adults who will move us towards sustainable energy, promote global health equity, and address other scientific issues impacting humankind. We believe that research can advance knowledge in significant ways that will contribute to better quality of life for humankind worldwide. In 1992, recognizing the importance of preparing our students to function in a global context, we created the Biomedical Research Abroad: Vistas Open (BRAVO!) Program. BRAVO! enables undergraduates with research experience to work in foreign labs on projects that are an extension of the research they initiate at the University of Arizona (UA). The program takes advantage of the international connections UA faculty members have and of the scientific talents and research experience of our undergraduates. BRAVO! is now more than a decade old. The Recognition Award for the Integration of Research and Education (RAIRE) given to UA by the National Science Foundation was in part because of our success with the BRAVO! Program.

This chapter reviews the BRAVO! Program’s accomplishments and describes what we have learned. The chapter includes the history and structure of the program as well as suggestions for others interested in developing similar activities.

UA researchers have always employed undergraduates in their research laboratories, however in 1988, this arrangement was formalized through establishment of the Undergraduate Biology Research Program (UBRP). Inclusiveness is a hallmark of UBRP. While 70% of UBRP students major in the biological sciences, participation is not limited to biology majors. There are very legitimate reasons for students in other majors to seek a research experience in biology. UBRP has supported journalism majors interested in being science writers, math majors interested in computational biology, philosophy majors interested in biomedical ethical issues, business majors interested in working in the biotechnology industry, education majors interested in being science teachers, and others.

Since 1988, UBRP has supported more than 1,200 undergraduate students conducting biologically-related research, averaging 140 students each year. This program has served as a model for the creation of additional undergraduate research programs at UA, including a Minority Access to Research Careers (MARC) Program, a NASA Space Grant Program, and others. Together, these programs have made it possible for any motivated undergraduate science major on our campus to have a research experience. While no UA office collects statistics on the number of students working in research labs, undergraduate students are a vital and valued part of the research enterprise. Students, regardless of major, learn important lessons in critical thinking when they become involved in research. UBRP has been described in a number of professional and university publications.^{1,
2, 3, 4, 5,} The program has a Web site at: http://www.blc.arizona.edu/ubrp

Initiation of the BRAVO! Program

In 1991, Anthony "Tony" Stazonne, a UBRP student with research experience, attended a seminar given by Dr. Azza Gabr, an Egyptian pediatrician who was studying the causative agents of diarrhea among children living in the Nile Delta. Tony recognized that the techniques Dr. Gabr described to detect certain water borne parasites (cryptosporidium and giardia) were not as advanced as the techniques he used in the lab at UA. Tony expressed his desire to travel to Egypt to work with Dr. Gabr at the Egyptian National Research Centre. He knew that he would learn a tremendous amount on such a trip, and he thought he had something to contribute from his UBRP experience. Tony was well regarded by Dr. Ronald Watson, the faculty member in whose lab he worked, and Tony’s plan made sense.

Because we had no identified source of funding for this kind of activity, we pieced together support from a variety of sources. UBRP paid for his plane ticket from Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) grant funds, the Bi-national Fulbright Commission in Cairo provided free housing in one of their guest houses, the Egyptian National Research Centre granted him access to a study population and supervised his lab work, the Naval Medical Research Unit 3 (NAMRU 3 - a US Naval installation in Cairo) agreed to let him use a fluorescent microscope to read his slides, Dr. Watson's lab provided kits needed for the research, and Tony donated his time. Tony spent twelve weeks working in Cairo and was able to present his findings at the 1993 Annual Meeting of the Society for Microbiology.

Tony returned to UA to finish his undergraduate degree and to attend UA Medical School. He continued to look for opportunities to collaborate with foreign scientists. Midway through his medical training, Tony received a fellowship from the American Heart Association to do research in Italy. After receiving his MD in 1998, he completed a medical residency in South Carolina, and is now an internist in Tucson. Tony demonstrated that students could not only make outstanding scientific ambassadors, but they could also make a real contribution to a research effort in another culture. BRAVO! participants learn a tremendous amount about the foreign culture they visit, about American science and culture, and about themselves. They gain confidence and become better prepared to contribute in today’s global environment.

Word of Tony's experience in Egypt spread rapidly through the UBRP grapevine. When he returned from Egypt he gave a seminar for UBRP students that stimulated additional requests from students interested in similar international experiences. Initially we used funds from an HHMI grant to fund students doing research abroad. Then in 1992, the Fogarty International Center at the National Institutes of Health, with funding from the Office for Research on Minority Health (now called the National Center on Minority Health and Health Disparities), issued a call for proposals to send minority students under-represented in the sciences to foreign countries to do research. While the call for proposals seemed to be for students to travel to foreign countries to do research on a group project, we responded because we had pilot data to substantiate our belief that we could send undergraduates abroad on their own (rather than in a group) to a foreign host lab where they could successfully carry out research. We were awarded our first Minority International Research Training (MIRT) grant in October 1993 and used MIRT funds to send students abroad beginning in 1994. The MIRT grant has been renewed twice and our current MIRT funding is through 2005. We have continued to use HHMI funds to support non-minority BRAVO! students.

Rationale for BRAVO!

According to the American Council on Education, “Unless today's students develop the competence to function effectively in a global environment, they are unlikely to succeed in the 21^st Century.⁶ We are aware of the impact that globalization has on our everyday lives as people move between countries and economies become increasingly internationally integrated. Although it is critically important that our students develop a broad worldview and skills required to work effectively in a global environment, science students do not often participate in study abroad programs. According to the 2003 Open Doors Report, of the 160,920 US students studying abroad in 2001/02, only 16 % were majoring in science, math, or engineering.⁷ Although statistics on the number of science undergraduates doing research abroad have not been collected, it can be safely assumed that these numbers are even smaller. Science majors often fail to see that an international experience could be important to their career, while a business or language major might find it essential. The highly structured science curriculum discourages, or even penalizes students who take time away from classes; a science major who spends a semester abroad might risk delaying graduation by a year. Moreover, some students are reluctant to be out of the country while they are in the process of applying to graduate or medical school.

BRAVO! students are required to be abroad for a minimum of 10 weeks and some have gone for as long as a year. Most go for three months during the summer. If the students’ international experience involves conducting research in a foreign research group in an area that is directly related to the students’ career goals, they tend to see the international experience as advantageous. Some students have been able to take Web-based courses or correspondence courses to keep up with the requirements to graduate on time and others have been able to substitute the research experience for a required class. Still other students, through careful planning, have been able to make room in their schedules for a summer or semester long international research experience. We can now convince them, with evidence from past years, that medical school and graduate school admissions committees tend to view international research experience as a plus in applications, even if it means that the student cannot be available for an interview at the standard time. In short, if the experience is relevant to the students’ educational and career goals, there are a variety of means of insuring that science students can have an international experience and still graduate on time.

International visitors to UA represent a significant resource for internationalizing students’ college experience. These visitors, who often work with UBRP students in research laboratories, are asked to give seminars to students on topics of shared scientific interest. During the past academic year, more than 850 visiting foreign scholars were engaged in collaborative work here. In addition, more than 3,000 international students, representing over 130 countries, study on our campus each year. While UA itself seems quite cosmopolitan, more than 70% of our students are state residents, and they often have little awareness of the world beyond Arizona. The BRAVO! program has been able to tap resources and international connections for the educational benefit of undergraduate researchers.

Student experiences illustrate the BRAVO! Program

Rose Do is one of more than 120 students over the past 13 years who have participated in BRAVO! Rose was a bright, 19-year-old undergraduate student who had never flown on an airplane or traveled further than Texas at the time she applied to BRAVO!. In spite of her limited world experience, she impressed the selection committee with her sophisticated plan to do research on transmission modes of a human protozoan parasite, cyclospora, in the shantytowns of Lima, Peru. She was poised and articulate in her interview. In May, 1997, Rose found herself on a flight to Lima where she had an experience that transformed her life and contributed to her understanding of enteric pathogens. She is now a medical student at UA and plans a career in international health with a focus on infectious diseases.

Figure 1: Concepcion "Nina" Roxas assessed growth faltering in children from a shanty town in Lima, Peru who were infected with the parasite giardia.

Similarly, Julie Bordowitz had never traveled east of the Mississippi before her BRAVO! experience took her to Heidelberg, Germany where she worked with Dr. Bernd Bukau studying molecular chaperones associated with heat shock proteins. The Bukau lab collaborates with the Vierling lab at UA where Julie worked for two years before applying to BRAVO! In Germany Julie was able to study heat shock proteins in a different model organism, E. coli., while the Vierling lab uses Arabidopsis. Before she returned from Germany, Dr. Bukau encouraged her to apply to the University of Heidelberg for graduate school and an Australian scientist in the Bukau lab suggested that she consider coming to his lab for her post-doctoral experience. Julie forged enduring relationships in Germany, further reinforcing the global nature of the scientific enterprise. Julie received her bachelor’s degree in 2003 and is working as a lab technician in the Vierling lab while applying to doctoral programs in cell and molecular biology.

Jessica Dominguez Clark started college on a one-way track to veterinary school until she found herself working with Dr. Bohuslav Dvorak in the UA Department of Pediatrics on the physiological effects of milk-borne growth factors on the maturity of the gut in neonatal rats. Dr. Dvorak, who is a native of the Czech Republic, maintains a number of collaborations with Czech scientists and encouraged Jessica to apply to BRAVO! Jessica became the first of a number of students from the Dvorak lab to travel to the small town of Novy Hradek, deep in the wooded mountains in the northeastern part of the Czech Republic, to work with Dr. Hana Kozakova, at the Institute of Microbiology of the Czech Academy of Sciences. In the Czech Republic Jessica’s project involved using the same model of the gastrointestinal tract, but she did in vitro instead of in vivo studies. This was important because the in vitro effect of inflammatory cytokines on intestinal enterocytes at the molecular level needs to be understood before additional in vivo experiments can be designed. Jessica accomplished enough in the Dvorak and Kozakova laboratories to be included as a co-author on several publications. She is now a doctoral student in physiology at UA.

Figure 2: Hardeep Phull (third from the left) enjoys some local culture in Krakow, Poland. Hardeep spent the 2002 fall semester working with Dr. Elwira Sliwinska, Associate Professor in the Laboratory of Molecular Biology and Cytometry, University of Technology and Agriculture, Bydgoszcz, Poland, trying to genetically engineer a better sugar beet.

East Asian studies combined with majors in anthropology and biochemistry were excellent preparation for Jared Ragland’s BRAVO! experience at the National Institute of Infectious Disease in Tokyo, Japan. Jared wondered how he would combine his interests in these seemingly disparate disciplines and through the BRAVO! program he found the answer. He will become a scientist who collaborates with East Asian scientists. Working in Japan with Dr. Kozo Tsuchida studying the molecular evolution of apolipophorin-III gave Jared an excellent start. His summer-long BRAVO! experience yielded a scientific paper in the Journal of Applied Entomology and Zoology (a Japanese journal). He is now in a doctoral program in biochemistry at the University of Washington, supported by an NSF Pre-doctoral Fellowship.

Figure 3: Samira Ehteshami, whose BRAVO! experience took her to the Institute of Child Health Research in West Perth, Australia to work with Dr. Patrick Holt, spent some of her spare time getting acquainted with a wambat.

Logistics

Since 1992, the BRAVO! program has sent 120 students to 72 institutions in 25 countries to conduct research that is an extension of the work they do on the UA campus. Host countries are in the developed world and developing countries as well as Eastern Europe (The Czech Republic and Poland). The application process is effective in identifying students motivated for this experience and in preparing them to be successful in the research they do abroad. Because applicants must prepare a proposal, only those students who see this opportunity as a serious educational experience complete the application. Twice as many students inquire about the program as complete the application process, but nearly all students who complete the BRAVO! application process are accepted. The minimum length of stay in the foreign lab is 10 weeks. A shorter stay reduces the likelihood that anything will be accomplished and thus is not allowed. Recently, students have opted for longer experiences, going abroad for a semester or for a year. We feel this is an encouraging trend and one that should be fostered to the extent that we have financial resources to support it.

To be most effective, the international experience should be embedded in a longer, more significant research experience that begins well before the student travels and continues once the student returns to the university. Thus, we require students to have at least six months of research experience at UA before applying. The majority of BRAVO! students come from the UBRP Program, which provides a good pool of applicants, since many students come into UBRP as early as their freshman year. Once a student has proven that s/he has a good grasp of the research done in the UA lab, and that s/he is a good lab citizen and emotionally mature, s/he can apply. The students’ reasons for applying to BRAVO! vary. Some students want to learn a technique used in the foreign lab but not at UA, others go to teach members of the foreign lab a technique that is used at UA but not in the foreign lab, while others want to have access to a particular study population or to gather samples from a particular location.

A student takes the following steps to be considered for the program.

Following the interview, the committee approves the application as it is written, requests revisions, or rejects the application. Many times the committee approves the project but makes suggestions for additional training the student needs prior to travel (i.e. the university’s blood borne pathogens workshop if the student will be working with blood products, etc.). More than anything else, the application process is designed to prepare the student both scientifically and emotionally for the work to be done abroad. Once the student’s application has been approved (at least two months in advance of travel), s/he meets individually with the program director to arrange for travel, passports, visas, and necessary inoculations.

There is a pre-departure meeting that includes foreign scholars from countries in which students will work. These individuals need not be scientists because the intent is to provide students with an orientation to the foreign culture. We try to hold this meeting well in advance of the students’ dates of travel so that the students can form relationships with the foreign national(s) of the country they will visit. The intent of the meeting is to insure that the students have some knowledge of the culture, norms, and food in the place they will work.

BRAVO! students are required to do some homework before this meeting. They are asked to come to the meeting with information about the host country, including the country’s form of government and name of the current leader, the name of the capital city, the currency and current exchange rate, its major exports and industries, the size and average life expectancy of its population, and a description of one major issue involving the country. This information is shared with the group. The foreign nationals and the program director also talk with the students at this meeting about dealing with loneliness and about adapting to a different culture.

It is always enlightening for the students to learn from foreign nationals what questions they, as Americans, are likely to be asked. To prepare for their experience, many students find that they need to become more aware of issues in the United States that are of concern to people abroad.

Figure 4: Student Francisco Villa (second from the left) with co-workers from Dr. Hiroshi Nakato's laboratory at Tokyo Metropolitan University.

If English is not the language spoken in the country the student will visit, s/he is strongly encouraged to enroll in a one-semester course in the language. If time does not permit this, students take a short course offered by a local private language school or have tutoring by a native speaker. We identify such individuals through the UA International Affairs Office and the UA Center for English as a Second Language. Inability to speak the local language does not usually interfere with the student’s scientific work abroad, because the collaborating foreign scientists all speak English. However, the student's experience outside the lab is significantly enhanced when s/he is able to converse in the local language. Students often report being asked to edit scientific papers being submitted in English, or to give informal English lessons. Students usually welcome these requests because it gives them a valued way to repay the hospitality extended to them in the foreign lab.

BRAVO! students are required to make a scientific and cultural presentation upon their return and to write an article for the UBRP newsletter. The meeting at which the students present is called a “datablitz” and is held over dinner with food representative of the country in which the student worked. The datablitz insures that the students not only have a forum for presenting what they have learned, but that other students can benefit from their experiences. It also gives participants a chance to reflect on the experience and to see how it fits into their overall educational experience. Datablitzes are effective in promoting the program to other students. Most students return to the UA laboratory they worked in prior to the experience. There they can finish up their projects, share new skills and techniques, and work on manuscripts for publication from the work accomplished abroad.

We try, to the extent possible, to make this program reciprocal. We try to bring the graduate students of our foreign collaborators to UA for research visits of three to six months. We target foreign graduate students rather than foreign undergraduates simply because it is easier to get J-1 visas for them (and thus avoid the difficulty and expense of having the student get a student visa which would require taking the TOEFL exam and being admitted to the university). Funds from the RAIRE grant were used over 5 years to support visits by 16 foreign graduate students. It is particularly important to provide this type of reciprocity for students from developing countries. The foreign graduate students work alongside the UBRP students and develop relationships that ease the BRAVO! students’ adaptation to the foreign lab group. Foreign graduate students all present at a datablitz during the time that they are on campus and thus UBRP students who do not become BRAVO! students have the benefit of interacting with them as well.

Financial Support

BRAVO! students receive round trip transportation from the United States to the host lab, up to $1,000 a month for living expenses and supplemental health insurance for the time spent abroad. Students with financial need can apply for an additional stipend of $800/month. Funds for research supplies to be used in the host country (up to $600/month) can be approved. This support can be especially important when the host lab is in a developing country.

Benefits to Students

While 13 years is not long enough to fully assess the long-term impact of an international research experience on students, we have encouraging preliminary indications that this experience is highly beneficial to all involved. Each student and each foreign scientist evaluate the program and each other at the conclusion of the student’s foreign stay. Students’ comments reflect their scientific growth and appreciation for other cultures. Katherine Schroeder, who spent a semester doing research at INSERM in Paris wrote, “I feel now more open toward and prepared for collaborating at an international level. Moreover, I have become more convinced of the necessity of such collaborative endeavors in facing the challenges that our increasingly ‘globalized’ economy poses.” BRAVO! undergraduate Chuck Hoeffer, whose experience was at the National Institutes of Infectious Disease in Japan, commented, "Before I zoomed up to Tokyoite speed, I felt like I had lived my whole life in slow motion. I quickly realized that space and time were very valuable commodities for the Japanese people; neither was ever wasted."

Foreign scientists frequently expressed appreciation for the undergraduate students who worked in their labs. Comments from Dr. Michael Lee at the University of Toronto on Verma Miera are typical. Dr. Lee wrote, “Verma’s contribution to our work was tremendous. She was self-directed and always had questions that aided in continuing our studies. She was always cheerful and those of us in the lab enjoyed her presence … (a) nice relationship developed with the University of Arizona staff. Cross-pollination of students (is) very useful to both sides of the exchange.” Dr. Hana Kozakova, of the Institute of Microbiology of the Czech Academy of Sciences, hosted Jessica Dominguez during the summer of 2000. Dr. Kozakova wrote, “Jessica was my best student and her evaluation is excellent! I would like to collaborate with her also in future.” These comments lead us to believe that the relationships formed between BRAVO! students and their foreign faculty sponsors will endure.

In terms of scientific productivity, more than 80 publications and presentations at scientific meetings have included BRAVO! students. While the extent to which these students incorporate their global perspectives into their career remains to be seen, many are headed for careers that would benefit from an international perspective and a more empathetic view of global issues in science and health. Those who go on to medical school and graduate programs in medical research, the biological sciences, public health, and biotech industries will find that global perspective and a sense of empathy for the world’s people will enhance their professional life.

The BRAVO! Program has had an impact on the UBRP Program in a number of interesting ways. Students are introduced to BRAVO! during their initial orientation to UBRP. Right from the very beginning of their research experience, BRAVO! has given some students an extra incentive to become sufficiently scientifically proficient to go abroad. Because UBRP does not require a research proposal but BRAVO! does, students applying to BRAVO! develop important skills that make them better scientists whether or not they receive BRAVO! support. Students also have become much more attuned to the international collaborations their UA faculty sponsors have and they have become less shy about getting to know the visiting foreign scientists they meet at UA.

BRAVO! is different in a number of ways from the typical study abroad experience. Unlike study abroad, these students travel to the foreign site on their own. They are not part of a group of American students and thus, they tend to become integrated into the foreign culture more readily than they would if they were part of a group. They are forced to establish relationships with local people and operate outside of their comfort zones. As a result, the students tend to form close and enduring relationships with colleagues in the foreign lab. Second, BRAVO! students spend the majority of their time doing research. They are not involved in classes, but instead are working closely with colleagues on finding answers to problems. Their shared scientific interests provide the framework on which friendships are built. Students also hone their critical thinking skills. Undergraduate participant Gabe Maxwell, wrote of his experience at the Institute of Parasitology in the Czech Academy of Sciences, “One of the most valuable things I learned was that there is more than one way to skin a cat. The lab here often had different protocols and often I was not able to use my protocols due to a lack of equipment, etc. Often I incorporated two techniques to get a sound result.” After an initial period of insecurity, participants often discover that they know more than they thought and they become more confident in their abilities.

The program has a built in measure of quality assurance. It is unlikely that the UA faculty sponsor will send a valued colleague abroad a student who is scientifically unprepared or emotionally immature. Conversely, the UA faculty sponsor, who has made an investment in a student, is unlikely to send a student to a foreign scientist who will not provide the student with a good experience.

Finally, the influence of the program extends well beyond individual participants. BRAVO! draws largely from a population of students from middle and lower income homes. The families of participants often become more aware of conditions outside of the US. We invite families to attend datablitzes and some parents and siblings have found ways to visit the student abroad. The connections extend to visits by the foreign scientists to UA. Often the families of participants host foreign scientists in their homes. The program encourages this kind of informal and personal interaction.

Challenges

BRAVO! is a highly individualized program. Because each experience is individually tailored, the program is very labor intensive. Not only does the UA faculty sponsor and host foreign scientist make a large investment of time in the undergraduate student, the program administrator invests a great deal in each student. Because the program conforms to each student's individual circumstances, needs and interests, however, we get a good return on our investment. In our estimation, students learn more when they are put in a situation where they have to adapt and figure things out on their own. By acting as our scientific ambassadors, BRAVO! students tend to grow more intellectually and personally than students who participate in a group experience.

BRAVO! is an effective and valuable but expensive program. It can be challenging to find funding for its continuation. Current funding comes from grants from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and from the National Institutes of Health.

Other challenges include finding support for the students of foreign collaborators to come to the US for short-term research visits. This kind of reciprocity is very important, especially with foreign sites in developing countries. Because federally funded grants frequently require those supported to be US citizens or permanent residents, federal grants cannot often be used to support foreign students. Fortunately for us, we were able to use our NSF RAIRE grant to bring 16 graduate students of our foreign collaborators to do research at UA for periods of 3 - 6 months. The goodwill this exchange generated among our foreign collaborators is immeasurable and we hope that by making this investment in “capacity building” we have laid the foundation for future successful proposals for collaborative research. In most cases, however, private sources must be found to support foreign science students.

Advice for Others Developing International Research Experiences for Undergraduates

While our program focuses on providing international research experiences in science, it does not mean that students in other disciplines could not benefit from a research experience abroad. Students of history might, for example, be able to travel to archives in foreign countries to look at original source documents; anthropology students might be involved in cross-cultural studies, economics students might look at issues related to changing markets. Language training may be more critical in disciplines other than science, where English is the unofficial language. It is key for the student, regardless of the discipline, to have a strong grounding in the research topic in order to take full advantage of this opportunity.

Research universities are well positioned to provide an international research experience for their students because faculty on these campuses tend to have a wealth of international collaborations. Tapping into these is a relatively easy matter. For those at small liberal arts colleges and institutions where this might not be the case, it is still possible to link to others in the world in a particular area of study. One way of doing this would be to locate faculty on campus who have had Fulbright experiences. These individuals would have contacts in other countries that can be called upon to arrange for an international research experience.

Funding can be a serious impediment to providing international research experiences, but there are several possible ways to support these experiences. What follows is a sampling of possibilities:

National Science Foundation Research Experiences for Undergraduates Program (NSF REU) NSF will accept proposals for REU sites and supplements to include undergraduate students in international projects. The deadline for REU site applications is September 15. Supplements can be submitted at any time. Program Officers at the International Division of NSF can be helpful in providing country specific information to those interested in submitting a proposal for this activity. For more information on REU Sites and Supplements see: http://www.nsf.gov/cgi-bin/getpub?nsf01121 To contact the NSF International Programs Division, go to: http://www.nsf.gov/home/int/

National Institutes of Health/Minority International Research Training Program (NIH MIRT) http://www.nih.gov/fic/programs/mirt.html provides training grants to send undergraduates abroad to do research on biomedical and behavioral topics. Some programs are structured as group experiences and others, like the UA BRAVO! program, are structured to be individualized research experiences.

National Security Education Act Program (NSEP). http://www.iie.org/programs/nsep/applic.htm NSEP makes awards to individual students. There is no restriction on field of study, but the international experience must be in a country of national security interest to the US. This excludes Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, but includes most of the rest of the world.

The Institution

The University of Arizona is a Research I University and land grant institution composed of 16 Colleges including the State's only Colleges of Agriculture, Pharmacy, Public Health, and Medicine. UA is one of only three universities in the state. Enrollment is 36,847 including 28,278 undergraduates (Fall 2002). Most UBRP students are drawn from the College of Science which had 2,918 majors in 2002/03; but the program has also included students with majors in the Colleges of Agriculture, Pharmacy, Engineering, Social and Behavioral Sciences, and Medicine (which is home to the undergraduate major in physiology). BRAVO! has supported students with majors in all of these colleges. While only 10% of undergraduates have majors in the College of Science, Science majors account for 18 % of the undergraduate honors students (761 out of 4,138 in 2002/03). This is more than any other college. Seventy-one percent of our students are Arizona residents.⁸

In fiscal year 2001, the most recent year for which information is available, UA ranked 14th among public institutions and 23rd among all institutions in the country in research expenditures http://vpr2.admin.arizona.edu/orca/Profile/Profile2002/Web Files/contents.htm Research is an integral part of our institutional mission, but not to the exclusion of teaching. Research and teaching have been inextricably linked on our campus--something that NSF recognized in 1997 with the RAIRE grant.

Acknowledgements

The BRAVO! Program is funded by grants to the University of Arizona from the National Science Foundation (370260), the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (71195-521304) and the National Institutes of Health (TW00036). We are deeply grateful to the many UA faculty members and their international collaborators, without whom the BRAVO! program would not be possible.