Released Dec. 11, 2007

COLLEGE STATION, Texas -- The College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Texas A&M University has recognized 31 faculty members for their commitment to recruit and mentor minority doctoral candidates under a special program funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

The New York-based foundation provides a fellowship of approximately $35,000 to each minority doctoral candidate recruited by a Sloan faculty mentor. The program seeks to help minorities become degreed professionals educated in the sciences, where they have been historically underrepresented.

The college has enrolled 15 Sloan Scholars in the two years that the program has been operating at Texas A&M.

“Our goal is to double the number of Sloan Scholars enrolled in the college by next fall,” said program coordinator Dr. Manuel Pina, an associate professor in the department of agricultural leadership, education and communications. “That would mean an extra $1 million in support for minority graduate students in the college.”

Faculty members who participate must be approved by the foundation and either have demonstrated success in recruiting minority graduate students or have approved plans for doing so.

For each student recruited, Sloan provides $2,000 to the faculty mentor as seed money for recruiting the next one.

“This program is truly a partnership,” said Dr. Gene Nelson, the college’s executive associate dean. “The funding by the foundation is matched by the department, college and university to fully support each minority doctoral student.

“The Sloan program not only honors faculty for their past successes in mentoring minority students, it expands their potential for the future by providing foundation funds that can be used to leverage the other sources for recruiting and mentoring new students.”

Faculty members honored at a luncheon Monday are from six academic departments. They are Drs. Sergio Capareda, Clyde Munster and Patricia Smith, department of biological and agricultural engineering; Thomas Boutton, Georgianne Moore, Humberto Perotto-Baldivieso, William Rogers, Bradford Wilcox and X. Ben Wu, ecosystem science and management; Julio Bernal, Boris Castro, Marvin Harris, Raul Medina, Albert Mulenga, Patricia Pietrantonio and Pete Teel, entomology.

Also, Paul de Figueiredo, Carlos Gonzalez and Heather Wilkinson, plant pathology and microbiology; Gillian Bowser, Ulrike Gretzel and Sanjay Nepal, recreation, park and tourism sciences; and Thomas DeWitt, Lee Fitzgerald, Delbert Gatlin III, Roel Lopez, Mariana Mateos, Mike Morrison, William Neill, Nova Silvy and Douglas Slack, wildlife and fisheries sciences.

To be eligible for the program, students must be U.S. citizens or U.S. residents who are Hispanic, black or Native American.

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http://agnews.tamu.edu/showstory.php?id=223

Contacts: Dave Mayes, (979) 845-2803, d-mayes@tamu.edu