Today, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) launched the Freeman Hrabowski Scholars Program to help build a scientific workforce that more fully reflects our increasingly diverse country. The $1.5 billion program honors UMBC President Freeman A. Hrabowski, III for his decades of leadership in growing and diversifying the pipeline of Ph.D.-level researchers, most prominently through UMBC’s Meyerhoff Scholars Program.
Alumni leading the way
UMBC is now the nation’s #1 producer of Black bachelor’s degree recipients who go on to earn a Ph.D. in the natural sciences and engineering, and this program builds on that legacy.
Meyerhoff Scholars alumni have earned 385 Ph.D.s, 155 medical degrees, and more than 300 master’s degrees (as of April 2022). More than 370 additional Meyerhoff alumni are currently enrolled in graduate and professional school. Students who became Meyerhoff Scholars are more than five times more likely to have completed or be currently enrolled in a STEM Ph.D. program than students who were accepted to the program but declined. Several universities across the country, including Penn State and UNC Chapel Hill, have successfully replicated the program, with support from HHMI and others.
Meyerhoff alumni include such rising stars as Kafui Dzirasa ’01, M8, chemical engineering, associate professor at Duke and an HHMI Investigator, and Kizzmekia Corbett ‘08, M16, biological sciences and sociology, lead of the NIH team that developed the technology for the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, and now assistant professor at Harvard.
