Hrabowski’s legacy: the Meyerhoff Scholars
During his three decades as president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), Freeman A. Hrabowski III built and honed the Meyerhoff Scholars Program into our nation’s finest initiative for attracting and educating students from underrepresented backgrounds in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math).
Made possible by the remarkable generosity of Robert and Jane Meyerhoff, the Hrabowski method is elegant and simple: Provide consistently high expectations, a strong sense of community, hands-on research experience, and staff and faculty members who are deeply invested in student achievement — the four pillars of college success in science.
Under Dr. Hrabowski’s leadership, the 1,400 Meyerhoff alumni have already gone on to earn over 900 graduate degrees, including more than 600 doctorates. Many are now tenure-track faculty members at our nation’s preeminent institutions. In fact, UMBC is the No. 1 producer of African American undergraduates who subsequently earn doctorates in the natural sciences and engineering.
Meyerhoff alumna Kizzmekia Corbett led a team at the National Institutes of Health to develop the technology for Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine. Now, scientists around the world are working to apply her team’s mRNA technology for treating everything from cancer to rare genetic diseases. Dr. Corbett has also been an outspoken advocate for equity in vaccine rollouts and clinical trials, insisting on diverse study populations.
Other Meyerhoff Scholars who played leading roles during the pandemic include Dr. Darian Cash, whose team at Moderna administered clinical trials; Dr. Letitia Dzirasa, Baltimore City health commissioner; and Dr. Jerome Adams, former U.S. Surgeon General. Dr. Annica Wayman, who directs UMBC’s biotechnology programs, is training the next generation of leading biotechnologists, and researchers like Dr. Kafui Dzirasa, at Duke, are leading the way in the neuroscience of mental health disorders.
This year, 55 more Meyerhoff Scholars graduated from UMBC, and gave us a glimpse into what is possible for our nation and our world. Sam Patterson, UMBC’s second Rhodes scholar, plans to transform transportation systems with an equity lens. Jordan Troutman, UMBC’s first Knight-Hennessy Scholar, will head to Stanford to continue researching bias in computational algorithms, impacting everything from criminal justice to social media.
In 2003, shortly after I had received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, I received a call from President Hrabowski inviting me to visit the UMBC campus. I took my medal with me and passed it around a room full of Meyerhoff Scholars to show them that Nobel laureates are real people. That you don’t have to be Einstein to make a difference, and you don’t have to be perfect to do something groundbreaking. And importantly, for the many Black Meyerhoff Scholars, that any of them could become the first Black Nobel laureate in medicine, physics, or chemistry.
Based on the talent pipeline every year at UMBC, institutions that have replicated the Meyerhoff Scholars Program’s core principles (like Penn State, UNC Chapel
Hill, UC Berkeley, and UC San Diego), and phenomenal HBCUs like Howard University are showing the world that Black Scientists Matter.
At the Johns Hopkins Club in January 2020, another Meyerhoff Scholar, Naomi Mburu, stood in front of the clinical leaders from the University of Maryland Medical School and Johns Hopkins. Named UMBC’s first Rhodes scholar in 2018, and currently studying nuclear engineering at Oxford, Ms. Mburu told the group how her father emigrated to the U.S. from Kenya for a better life. He worked his way through the University of Baltimore by serving as a kitchen helper — at the very same Johns Hopkins Club.
The goal of the Meyerhoff Scholars Program and its replications is to support generations of diverse STEM leaders who aspire to be the world’s best in science, medicine and engineering, and who will carry that forward to future scholars. They will each bring their unique perspectives which will enhance the research enterprise for everyone. For this, we all should thank Freeman Hrabowski, who has announced he will retire at the end of the academic year, for changing the course of scientific history.