Hope College is one of only 12 colleges and universities nationwide, and the only institution from Michigan, to receive a 2015 Beckman Scholars Program award from the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation in support of student research.
The Beckman Scholars Program is an invited program for accredited universities and four-year colleges in the United States. It provides scholarship support to select students at the recipient institutions in chemistry, biochemistry, and the biological and medical sciences with an emphasis on sustained, in-depth laboratory research experiences with faculty mentors.
The $104,000 award to Hope will support a total of four students across the next three years as they conduct research mentored by individual faculty or in collaborative initiatives involving biology, chemistry, engineering, mathematics and physics. Selected as sophomores or juniors, the students will each receive a total of $21,000 in support to conduct research with faculty members full-time during two summers and part-time during the intervening school year. They will also be expected to major in one of the supported disciplines and to stay involved in research at Hope as seniors.
In addition to providing stipends for the students, the award also includes funding for related supplies and travel. The foundation hosts an annual research symposium for the program’s student scholars and their faculty mentors each summer.
The Beckman Scholars are among scores of students who conduct research campus-wide at Hope during both the summer and the school year. Each summer, more than 160 students engage in research full-time mentored by Hope faculty mentors.
The Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation was established in 1977. The foundation makes grants to program-related, non-profit research institutions to promote research in chemistry and the life sciences, broadly interpreted, and particularly to foster the invention of methods, instruments, and materials that will open up new avenues of research in science.
Hope also received Beckman Scholars Program Institutional Awards from the foundation in 1998, which was the year that the program began, 2000, 2002, 2005, 2007 and 2012. This year's proposal from Hope was written, and the grant will be administered, by Dr. Aaron Best, who is the Harrison C. and Mary L. Visscher Associate Professor of Genetics; and Dr. Jeffrey Johnson, associate professor of chemistry and Schaap Research Fellow.
In addition to Hope, the colleges and universities to receive Beckman Scholars Program awards for 2015 are: Barnard College; the College of William and Mary; Columbia University; Furman University; Haverford College; San Francisco State University; the University of California, Los Angeles; the University of Kansas; the University of Pittsburgh; and Yale University.