Meharry’s Valerie Montgomery Rice, MD, addresses the opening session of the 12th International Symposium on Health, held in Nashville last December.

Students Enjoy Visits with Scientists

Students from six Davidson County high schools were among those who benefited from the community outreach portion of the 12^th International Symposium on Health, hosted by Meharry Medical College in December. The symposium is a biennial event of RCMI, the Research Centers in Minority Institutions program, a division within the National Institutes of Health.

“The most important part of this conference is the bringing together of a diverse group of basic science researchers and clinical researchers, and now we bring in more of the community,” explained Valerie Montgomery Rice, MD, executive director of Meharry’s Center for Women’s Health Research and the principal investigator of a six-year grant to host two more symposia and publish the proceedings of all three. “It’s an opportunity to showcase all of the great scientific innovations and figure out how we can collaborate more effectively and get those great innovations and interventions out to the community sooner.”

With registered attendance of 678, the Nashville event was by far the largest gathering so far. The numbers swelled to nearly 800 on the day the students joined in. Held at the Renaissance Nashville Hotel, the symposium was entitled “Bridging the Gap Between Disparity and Equity: New Minds — New Methods.”

Most of the research presented focused on diseases that take a stronger toll on certain ethnic groups and minority communities: cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, HIV/AIDS and … added at this session … obesity and metabolic syndrome. Specific sessions also included topics such as environmental toxicology, neurologic and neuropsychiatric disorders, reproductive health and alternative medicine. The four-day program was packed with nine general sessions, 13 concurrent sessions, 56 concurrent oral presentations and a whopping 511 poster presentations.

Rice said trainees at the participating institutions are encouraged to fully participate. “This sometimes is the first opportunity to present their research, and it’s less intimidating, of course, to do it in a poster format,” she said.

RCMI is comprised of 18 minority colleges and institutions with researchers studying diseases that disproportionately affect people of color. Through RCMI, minority scientists are afforded more opportunities in mainstream research, and collaborative bridges are built between the institutions. Meharry was joined in hosting the symposium by Tuskegee University and Morehouse School of Medicine.

Rice said the planning team was “very aggressive” with its community involvement, and the result was an extraordinary opportunity for 117 Metro high schoolers. The idea was “to stimulate their interest in science,” Rice explained. Career development was one session, which Rice described as “speed dating.” During three 15-minute sessions, “they got to sit at a table of other like minds and have someone come to speak to them.” The students also toured an interactive exhibit on healthy living sponsored by the GE Healthymagination project. In addition, the students were invited to visit the exhibit hall and meet scores of researchers. The students stayed for lunch to hear John J. Whyte, MD, MPH, the chief medical expert for the Discovery Channel, who spoke about how to create positive health messages using technology.

Symposium participants also attended a reception at the Adventure Science Center, where they were treated to the opening of a traveling exhibit. The Biomedical Faces of Science exhibit features interactive videos of 12 scientists of color from around the country, who explain their fields of study and tomorrow’s biomedical opportunities. The exhibit is geared to middle- and high-schoolers.

Sidney A. McNairy Jr., PhD, a division director for National Center for Research Resources (RCMI’s parent organization), said the Nashville event was a rousing success. McNairy was the first RCMI director when the U.S. Congress established the program in 1985. It launched with an operational budget of $4.7 million. Now the division supports research in 32 states and 30 different medical schools with an operational budget of just more than $300 million, he said.

The most important word in the title Research Centers in Minority Institutions is the word in, McNairy explained. “It’s not minority science; it’s science that is of excellence in preparing young people to actually pursue careers in the biomedical sciences. It’s also excellent in affording the faculty of these institutions the opportunity to contribute to the research agenda of the National Institutes of Health.”

NIH’s mandate to RCMI, he continued, is “to evolve new knowledge to lead to better health for everyone, both majority and minority communities throughout this country. That was the impetus for the creation of this program.”

McNairy tipped his hat to Rice’s research and to the work of Meharry’s James Hildreth, MD, PhD. A Rhodes Scholar, Hildreth is director of the college’s Center for AIDS Health Disparity. “The excitement that I have about James Hildreth’s research is that he is a preeminent investigator at Meharry Medical College who, in fact, could be anywhere in this world in terms of the quality of his research pursuit. He elected to go back to Meharry Medical College,” he said. “In so doing, he’s training world-class investigators. He has been competitively funded. He stands tall in terms of his peers.”

RCMI boasts a Translational Research Network, with data processing handled by a supercomputer at Jackson State University. RTRN ensures seamless partnerships among the researchers at RCMI institutions and among others.

“The goal is not for these institutions to be in an isolated configuration, but it is to facilitate their collaboration and involvement with institutions throughout the country and throughout the world,” McNairy said.

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