Yale Bulletin and Calendar

October 4-11, 1999

Volume 28, Number 7

Grant supports STAR program
to promote success in sciences

Yale has received a $100,000 grant from Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals, Inc., to support STARS (Science, Technology and Research Scholars) -- a program that promotes academic success in the sciences among women, minorities and the physically challenged, and that encourages these groups to pursue scientific careers.

The STARS program provides mentoring, workshops, research opportunities, tutoring and a variety of other supports for selected college students throughout their four years in college.

"As a research-driven company, Boehringer Ingelheim is committed to cultivating diversity and excellence in science," says Peter Mueller, senior vice president of research and development. "Pharmaceutical companies thrive on innovation. By bringing together talented individuals from diverse backgrounds, different cultures and life experiences, we create an environment that fosters a broader perspective and can pursue solutions to today's medical challenges from many different directions."

Cassandra Nikituk, director of corporate staffing for Boehringer Ingelheim Corp. in the United States, says the company hopes to attract a more diverse work force in the future through the STARS program.

"The more diversity you have, the more innovation you have," she says. "It gives us the opportunity to have contact with individuals who hopefully have a positive experience with Boehringer Ingelheim. They are some of the best and the brightest and these are the people we are hoping to attract."

STARS initially was funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, which continues to help support the program, along with Boehringer Ingelheim.

"Greater numbers of these students [in the STARS program] are continuing as science majors than would have in the past," says Judith Hackman, associate dean of Yale College. "And their grades are better. We even have found that academically they do as well as many students with higher SAT averages."

The academic director of STARS at Yale, chemistry instructor Iona Black, says the students in the program are accustomed to achieving in high school and become discouraged when their initial science grades are lower than expected.

"What would happen is that these students had not been exposed to advanced placement classes, so they were not getting A's at Yale," she explains. "They then felt they didn't have the ability to handle the course work.

"The STARS program shows they have the ability now that the support is there," she adds.

More than 150 students have participated in STARS since it began in 1995. Of the 90 students who participated beginning in 1995 and 1996, all but two have continued as science majors. That figure compares with a 50 percent rate of attrition among the targeted groups prior to STARS.

The program gives the students an opportunity to work in research laboratories early in their college careers. "This way they can be trained early and they can succeed," says Black. "This then makes them more competitive for national and international fellowships and scholarships, so they become part of the scientific community earlier, within Yale and outside of Yale."

One student in the program, Syeeda Amin, a junior with a double major in chemical engineering and political science, enrolled in STARS at the end of her freshman year. In addition to the workshops, she worked with a professor on a project using lasers to clean microchips. Last summer she interned at Boehringer Ingelheim.

"It was a wonderful experience," Amin says. "I worked with a chemical engineering Ph.D. on doing a kinetics model for purification filtration of a drug. I also had an amazing opportunity to work on micro reactors, which is a new technology."

Amin says her research experience at Yale helped bridge the gap between theory and real world applications. The Boehringer Ingelheim internship took that perspective one step further for her. "With research you check every possible avenue," she notes. "In industry, it's more 'This is what I need to know. This is how I need to do it.' The pace is a lot faster."

Boehringer Ingelheim, based in Ridgefield, Connecticut, is the largest U.S. subsidiary of Boehringer Ingelheim and a member of the Boehringer Ingelheim worldwide group of companies. Boehringer Ingelheim, which is headquartered in Ingelheim, Germany, ranks among the top 20 pharmaceutical companies in the world.

-- By Jacqueline Weaver

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