Alliance Programs

The Faculty Exchange Program would provide opportunities for Alliance faculty members to visit between and among campuses in order to conduct seminars, workshops, and other scholarly presentations. These presentations will be intended to spawn opportunities for collaborative teaching and research, either through the above Faculty Fellowships, or through other relationships that develop through the exchanges. A typical presentation would involve members of a research team each giving a series of presentations that together describe a program of research that is of mutual interest to the AMC and to the HBCU.

The Faculty Development Fellowships provide prolonged face-to-face mentoring opportunities between seasoned (Academic Medical Centers (AMC) researchers and junior HBCU faculty who are seeking careers as an independent researchers in the health sciences. The Faculty Development Fellowship Program would begin with an 8-10 week summer experience for the junior faculty investigator as a collaborator in the laboratory or clinical research program of a seasoned (usually NIH-funded) investigator. The summer experience would provide the opportunity for the junior faculty member to begin and/or refine his/her research focus. Junior investigators will be paired with senior investigators according to the match of mutual interests and lines of investigation. During the summer, the junior faculty member and senior faculty member would team up to write a minority supplement to the senior faculty member’s award. This supplement would be used to buy-down the faculty member's teaching load at the HBCU, so that they could work on research with the parent grant rather than teach at the HBCU. These minority supplements are quick turnaround, and are administratively buy not competitively reviewed. Administrative review can produce funding within 3 months of submission. The NIH award would in turn allow the junior faculty member to continue the line of investigation begun during the summer. The goal is for the funded research to lead to an R-01 in the name of the HBCU and with the minority investigator as Principal Investigator. Naturally, one would expect such R-01s to still involve the parent lab or research program at the AMC in some way. The ultimate goal also is for the junior investigator to evolve into a senior investigator with his/her own independent line of research and trainees at the HBCU.