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The Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership and the at ����Ӱҵ have been awarded a three-year, nearly $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation to increase the pipeline of minority psychology researchers.

The $986,270 grant program, (CAUSE) is an initiative of the City College of New York and the Borough of Manhattan Community College. Focused on the field of clinical and translational psychology, CAUSE aims to increase the number of Hispanic, low-income, and other minoritized students in the fields of clinical and translational psychology.

Psychology is the largest undergraduate major at ����Ӱҵ, a Hispanic Serving Institution, yet the field remains overwhelmingly White; only eight percent of psychologists in the U.S. workforce were Hispanic, five percent were Black or African-American, and three percent were Asian, .

Through CAUSE, ����Ӱҵ hopes to address this issue by exposing underrepresented groups to the field early in their academic careers through various experiences and research opportunities. These are designed to increase the number of these targeted students who continue on to graduate school and/or ultimately enter research careers in psychology.

CAUSE will create a pipeline of programs for these populations by expanding its existing partnership with BMCC. That program, Bridges to Baccalaureate, is a two-year scholarship that allows minority-serving institution BMCC’s aspiring biomedical and behavioral sciences students to progress to ����Ӱҵ, where they are able to earn an undergraduate degree in a STEM field.

“The general goal is to expose students to research, to retain them, and to build their research identity,” said Chair and Professor of Psychology Robert Melara, who is the grant director and principal investigator of Bridges to Baccalaureate. “This program is designed to reach them earlier in the pipeline so that they can attain research self-efficacy.”

Each year, 200 students (100 from each of ����Ӱҵ and BMCC) will participate in a semester-long Learning Community course. Focused on career exploration, the course includes lab visits, an introduction to research culture and processes, and career/soft skills development. The program will be integrated into existing academic offerings as a three-credit course at ����Ӱҵ, and a one-credit elective at BMCC.

Eighty students, 40 from each institution, will participate in an introduction to research course (Research in Psychology at BMCC and Experimental Psychology at ����Ӱҵ). Five from each institution will then be selected as summer research interns with ����Ӱҵ faculty.

The initial 200-student cohort is expected to be enrolled in Fall 2025. Once fully operational, CAUSE is expected to engage 350 students over four years.