RAMP program established the website (ramp.engr.ucr.edu), trainee application forms, review committee and review criteria in the first year of program. RAMP reached out to all undergraduate students in broad STEM majors in Bourns College of Engineering (BCOE) and College of Natural and Agricultural Sciences (CNAS) through emails, flyers, events, and dedicated staff in the Student Success Office at each college at the University of California at Riverside (UCR). RAMP program has begun the training of 4 students in the fundamentals of stem cell research. Because the students started the program in June 2023, they have not yet taken any academic stem cell science courses. However, in early-July 2023, the cohort was part of a week-long stem-cell research methodologies training program, conducted at UC Riverside’s Stem Cell Center Core Facility. They also received training in scholarly research methods and practices, professional development workshops, and participated in group critiques of their oral presentations. In addition to the explicit knowledge that these activities transmitted, many of them also prompted students to reflect on tacit knowledge as a significant aspect of scholarly practice. RAMP has also provided trainees with ample opportunities to practice the skills that they are both developing and refining: in the lab, through outreach, and in their writing and presentations. At the end of the summer, the cohort participated in two symposia at UCR, one at which two students presented posters, and the other at which all four students gave oral presentations. In addition to the training and support provided by the leadership team, in-lab mentors have helped trainees one-on-one and there have been frequent communications with RAMP leadership. For administrative mentoring support, RAMP leadership met with students at a minimum of once per month to ensure that they were progressing through the program as designed. Our trainees have been recruited from disparate disciplines and have all found mentors relevant to their interests. RAMP will continue to graft fundamental science education onto a skill-acquisition framework that enables students to learn methods that, though often ambiguous, are also among the most fundamental practices of scientific scholarship.
Reporting Period:
Year 2
CIRM COMPASS funded UCR RAMP program hosted two cohorts of 12 undergraduate students for this period. Each cohort received cohort-specific trainings and achieved the overall training goals successfully.
RAMP 2024 Cohort
RAMP has onboarded a new group of 8 undergraduate students as the 2nd cohort. All students have completed a week-long training program on stem-cell research methodologies at UC Riverside’s Stem Cell Center and Core Facility. They also received training in scholarly research methods and practices and attended professional development workshops. RAMP has provided the trainees with multiple opportunities to practice and refine their skills in the lab, outreach, writing, and poster and oral presentations.
At the end of the summer, the cohort participated in two symposiums at UCR. Six students presented posters at one symposium, while two students gave oral presentations at the other. All eight students also took part in the CIRM SPARK 2024 conference hosted by UC Riverside.
In addition to the training and support provided by the leadership team, in-lab mentors have helped trainees one-on-one, and there has been frequent communications with RAMP leadership. For administrative mentoring support, RAMP leadership met with students at a minimum of once per month to ensure that they were progressing through the program as designed. Our trainees have been recruited from disparate disciplines and have all found mentors relevant to their interests on research topics aligned with CIRM mission. RAMP will continue to focus on tacit-knowledge, on grafting fundamental science education onto a skill-acquisition framework that enables students to learn methods that, though often ambiguous, are also among the most fundamental practices of scientific scholarship. These extend from experimental practices in the lab to skills vital to enacting the protocols of scholarly communication (on which the students received training during the summer quarter). For this new cohort, those communication skills involve the identification of scholarly conventions and the deepening of students’ comprehension of the concepts relevant to their lab work.
RAMP 2023 Cohort
All 4 undergraduate students from our 1st cohort participated in the 2024 CIRM Trainee Networking Conference hosted by USC. They all presented posters showcasing their research. Additionally, they helped with the CIRM SPARK Conference by leading tours of UCR, providing feedback to fellow students on their presentations and posters, and offering networking and support.
Communications Training evolved for this cohort in the second year: whereas the year-one communications training focuses on the identification of scholarly conventions and deepening conceptual comprehension, in the second year, the training moves to communications practices associated with collaboration, experimental design, and article writing. This past summer, the students leveraged their methodological knowledge to design a collaborative experiment.
Reporting Period:
Year 3
CIRM COMPASS funded UCR RAMP program hosted three cohorts of 20 undergraduate students for this period. In this period, 4 trainees graduated from the program. Each cohort received cohort-specific trainings and achieved the overall training goals successfully.
RAMP 2025 Cohort
RAMP has onboarded a new group of 8 undergraduate students as the 3rd cohort. All students have completed a week-long training program on stem-cell research methodologies at UC Riverside’s Stem Cell Center Core Facility. They also received training in scholarly research methods and practices and attended professional development workshops. RAMP has provided the trainees with multiple opportunities to practice and refine their skills in the research lab, outreach, writing, and poster and oral presentations. In addition to the training and support provided by the program leadership team, in-lab mentors have helped trainees one-on-one, and there has been frequent communications with RAMP leadership. For administrative mentoring support, RAMP leadership met with students at a minimum of once per quarter to ensure that they were progressing through the program as designed. Our trainees have been recruited from diverse disciplines and have all found mentors relevant to their interests on research topics aligned with CIRM mission. They work closely with their faculty mentors and hands-on lab mentors on their research projects. At the end of summer, the cohort participated in the Marlan and Rosmary Bourns College of Engineering (BCOE) Summer Research Symposium where they delivered oral presentations and reflected on their summer experience.
RAMP will continue to focus on tacit knowledge, on grafting fundamental science education onto a skill-acquisition framework that enables students to learn methods that, though often ambiguous, are also among the most fundamental practices of scientific scholarship. These extend from experimental practices in the lab to skills vital to enacting the protocols of scholarly communication (on which the students received training during the summer quarter). For this new cohort, those communication skills develop from students’ identification of scholarly conventions and exploration of the concepts most relevant to their laboratory research work.
RAMP 2024 and 2023 Cohort
Communications Training for students in their second and third years of the program: whereas the year-one communications training focuses on the identification of scholarly conventions and deepening conceptual comprehension, in the second year, the training moves to communication practices associated with article writing, public communication and personal statement development for application to graduate school. These cohorts also continued to work on presentation and delivery skills that they leveraged in a range of local, regional, and national conferences.
All eight students in these experienced cohorts either presented at BCOE’s Summer Research Symposium or at CIRM’s Trainee Networking Conference in Los Angeles. Four of these students (one from our 1st and three from our 2nd cohorts) attended the CIRM Trainee Networking Conference in Hollywood: three presented posters showcasing their research, and one was selected for and delivered an oral presentation. Additionally, two of these students presented posters at the 12th Inland Empire Stem Cell Consortium (IESCC) Symposium in November 2024 hosted by UCR. Those two students also presented at additional conferences (one presented a poster at the 25th UC Systemwide Bioengineering Conference and at the Biomedical Engineering Society’s Annual Meeting) and another presented at the 2025 Southern California Applied Mathematics Symposium. A third published a SPIE proceeding paper on BiOS 2025 (https://doi.org/10.1117/12.3049437).
Grant Application Details
Application Title:
Research Training and Mentorship Program to Inspire Diverse Undergraduates toward Regenerative Medicine Careers (RAMP)
Public Abstract:
RAMP will train 18 students in the fundamentals of stem cell research: this program will include three cohorts of six trainees each. In the required stem cell science courses, undergraduate trainees will gain the lab skills required to work on guided research projects in host labs. RAMP builds on our well-established stem-cell infrastructure and its rigorous approach to training. All research labs are in new or renovated buildings and are fully equipped with modern instruments. Our stem cell faculty’s labs are extramurally funded, most by NIH or NSF. We aim to make this research area more accessible and inclusive by focusing on the acquisition of tacit knowledge. For undergraduates with minimal experience in a lab, the difficulty of acquiring such knowledge can be especially acute. Thus, rather than leave trainees to wonder about science scholarship’s implicit expectations, RAMP’s mentorship system prompts them to actively engage those parts of the learning process that remain confusing or impede comprehension. This system has been developed to catalyze tacit knowledge acquisition—beyond asking students to identify skills that are difficult to articulate or formalize, RAMP also provides trainees with ample opportunities to practice their skills (in the lab, through outreach, and in their writing). In-lab mentors help trainees on-on-one and mentor-liaisons connect them to RAMP’s leadership team. Trainees are also required to develop rhetorical skills, an effort in which they will be supported by the program’s four science communications courses. This sequence includes public science & ethics, a science policy course, scholarly communications, and a capstone course. The latter is a culmination, not just of the communications sequence, but also of their time in RAMP. Trainees will revisit and revise their work from their prior courses and will write a reflective text that explores the relations among the items they include in their portfolios. These items will include lab notes, op-eds, policy pitches, presentations, and a scholarly paper. By working in this range of genres, trainees will refine their understandings of the broader impacts of their own scientific work, which will be a boon to RAMP’s outreach efforts. By connecting scientific practices to real-world policy issues, trainees will have a better sense of the contexts relevant to the patients and healthcare workers with whom they interact. Our trainees will be recruited from majors relevant to stem cell research. To integrate RAMP coursework with the graduation requirements of a range of degree programs, trainees from different majors will be allowed to use the foundational courses either as special electives or independent study credits towards their degree requirements. RAMP grafts fundamental science education onto a skill-acquisition framework that enables students to learn methods that, though often ambiguous, are also among the most fundamental practices of scientific scholarship.
Statement of Benefit to California:
RAMP belongs to a university that is situated in a medically-underserved region of California. And while this region also lags behind most of California in terms of economic opportunities, it is also demographically diverse. Given the local needs, our university strives to put special value on those student accomplishments that provide value for communities. RAMP has been designed with this spirit in mind. That is, as long as students’ home communities continue to face issues like medical hardship, student success will remain incomplete (as will the success of university that educated them). With this dynamic in mind, CIRM’s COMPASS grant is a rare opportunity to align the interests of individual students with those of their communities. In fact, RAMP highlights the responsibilities of our university and our state. The citizens of our area face medical hardships—both as a result of an impoverished healthcare infrastructure and from diseases that are currently difficult to treat. It is our responsibility to use programs like COMPASS to attack the two sides of this problem. RAMP is well situated to do that: our university’s demographics give us a strong pool of diverse applicants to draw from and our stem-cell research program is on the cutting edge of medical research. Moreover, RAMP undergraduates who graduate into healthcare, academic, or policy careers will contribute to the diversification of those industries. Of those three, healthcare is the most obvious industry that would have meaningful impact on our region. If our university develops healthcare treatments and graduates more doctors who stay local, that’s a success. But if a substantial portion of those doctors already call this area home, that’s another kind of success. Patients often lack culturally responsive healthcare. Although that phenomenon is not always easy to quantify or measure, it is yet another barrier to an already underserved population. IT will take years, if not decades for RAMP’s capacity to affect this problem to be fully actualized. However, there are smaller ways that we contribute to building the pathways towards that future: e.g., our university’s program that supports medical school applicants has promised to include any RAMP students interested in that path; our patient outreach events put students out in those communities now, not in some hoped for future. RAMP will thus have meaningful effects on its California region now and in the future. And while we develop this program’s interventions, we will actively seek the community’s input and feedback: for instance, in the third year of the program, we plan a public workshop to assess RAMP effectiveness. This workshop will enable us to strategize how to continue to develop, and expand on, this type of work going forward. It will also be an occasion for RAMP to offer a public account of its work, which is especially important for those local communities that have a stake in it.
