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UMBC has been awarded $1 million in grants from the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation to support students with financial need who intend to pursue degrees in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields.

The Foundation lauded UMBC’s demonstrated record of advancing the success of underrepresented students in STEM. UMBC is the country’s #1 producer of Black undergraduates who go on to earn doctorates in the life sciences and math and computer sciences combined, and also the nation’s leading producer of Black undergraduates who go on to earn the combined M.D.-Ph.D. (physician scientists).

UMBC has one of the country’s most diverse undergraduate communities, with more than 60 percent of its students being from minority groups. UMBC has been at the forefront of efforts to increase diversity and student success in STEM, particularly through the Meyerhoff Scholars Program, which supports undergraduate students of all backgrounds who plan to pursue doctoral study in the sciences or engineering and who are interested in the advancement of minorities in those fields. The program has served as a national model that has been replicated by several other institutions.

“The Meyerhoff Scholars Program is one example of how UMBC has long worked to redefine excellence in higher education,” says UMBC President Valerie Sheares Ashby. “We are deeply grateful for the partnership of the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation and its support in the form of this new grant, which will allow us to touch even more lives and advance inclusive excellence in the State of Maryland and beyond.”

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