[Eduardo] Robleto (Life Sciences) oversees the National Science Foundation REU Site grant that supports 10 undergraduate students for nine weeks each summer. The program aims to provide the students with hypothesis-based projects that investigate mechanisms of evolution and promote careers in science. 

The REU grant has been funded at UNLV for the past 16 years and Robleto and his colleague Kurt Michael Regner were awarded the grant again this year. It will support a total of 30 students over the next three years. 

Robleto says it has proven to be an effective tool to for increasing the representation of students from historically excluded communities in science overall. And more specifically, to help UNLV recruit graduate students. Grifaldo is now a Ph.D. student at UNLV.

“We need to make stories like Jessica’s more common. We have a diverse campus. It’s easy to find minority undergraduate students in the science fields, but it gets harder at the graduate and Ph.D. levels. It is important to give them a chance. We have great talent at UNLV, but unless we help them, they don’t have a chance to express that talent.”

Read more from “First-Gen Student Awarded National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship“

Source: UNLV News Center