PREP-aring is worth it: Success of the Case Western Reserve University Postbaccalaureate Research Education Program and its Scholars

2026 · doi:10.64898/2025.12.30.697004
preprint OA: closed
Full text JSON View at publisher

Abstract

The National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) Postbaccalaureate Research Education Program (PREP) was a research-intense, one-year training program for recent college graduates from experiential backgrounds uncommon in science who intended to matriculate with a PhD program in preparation for a career in biomedical research. Case Western Reserve University had an NIGMS-supported PREP (CasePREP) from 2007 until 2025, the year NIGMS terminated the program and early expired the PREP funding mechanism. We report here the extent that CasePREP, with its 108 Scholars, met program goals as well as the economic and scientific impact NIGMS-supported PREP has had for a variety of stakeholders. CasePREP was a great success as measured by its major outcomes: matriculation into a PhD or MD/PhD program (83%) and completion of degree (51 Scholars to date). CasePREP Scholars have persisted in science and have made substantial contributions to the scientific workforce and enterprise. PREPs in general provided a crucial bridge for research talents who had little prior research opportunities to realize their potential and career goals. NIGMS termination of PREP support has negative economic consequences and endangers an important pathway to a career in science for Americans who would not otherwise have similar opportunities.
Full text 1,494 characters · extracted from oa-doi-fallback · click to expand
Abstract The National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) Postbaccalaureate Research Education Program (PREP) was a research-intense, one-year training program for recent college graduates from experiential backgrounds uncommon in science who intended to matriculate with a PhD program in preparation for a career in biomedical research. Case Western Reserve University had an NIGMS-supported PREP (CasePREP) from 2007 until 2025, the year NIGMS terminated the program and early expired the PREP funding mechanism. We report here the extent that CasePREP, with its 108 Scholars, met program goals as well as the economic and scientific impact NIGMS-supported PREP has had for a variety of stakeholders. CasePREP was a great success as measured by its major outcomes: matriculation into a PhD or MD/PhD program (83%) and completion of degree (51 Scholars to date). CasePREP Scholars have persisted in science and have made substantial contributions to the scientific workforce and enterprise. PREPs in general provided a crucial bridge for research talents who had little prior research opportunities to realize their potential and career goals. NIGMS termination of PREP support has negative economic consequences and endangers an important pathway to a career in science for Americans who would not otherwise have similar opportunities. Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. Footnotes Updated the URL of the first citation in the bibliography.

Text is read by the "Ask this paper" AI Q&A widget below. Extraction quality varies by source — PMC NXML preserves structure cleanly, OA-HTML may include some navigation residue, and OA-PDF can have broken hyphenation. The publisher copy (via DOI) is the canonical version.

My notes (saved in your browser only)

⚙ Ask this paper AI returns verbatim quotes from the full text · source: oa-doi-fallback ⓘ

Answers must be backed by verbatim quotes from this paper's full text. Hallucinated quotes are dropped automatically; if no verbatim passage answers the question, we say so. How this works

Citation neighborhood (no data yet)

We don't have any in-corpus citations linked to this paper yet. This is a recent paper (2026) — citers typically take a year or two to land, and the OpenAlex reference graph may still be filling in.

Source provenance

europepmc
last seen: 2026-05-20T01:45:00.602351+00:00