During the past 15 years, a variety of health and enrichment programs were created at University of California, Irvine School of Medicine, with a vision of helping students achieve their goal of pursuing a career in healthcare. The cascading nature of our programs has been described previously [12, 13]. In brief, college and medical students coach a group of high school students under the direction of the faculty leader. In this paper, we describe the evolution of the research program and the follow-up of college coaches.

On-Site Research Program

In 2012, we started a 2-week on-site Research Program where groups of high school students and college coaches rotated in different laboratories and got a sense of translational science research under the mentorship of faculty and Ph.D. students and college coaches. The students and coaches completed modules related to human subject research, research ethics, and animal and lab safety before attending the labs. In the afternoons, the participants spent their time in various laboratories and, through hands-on experience, learned about in vitro lab techniques such as immunostaining, nanotechnology, electroencephalogram, and electrophoresis. Additionally, they became familiar with different in vivo lab techniques through animal models and the importance of “bench-to-bedside” research. In the mornings, the high school students worked on a literature review project under the direction of their coach.

Online Research Program

In 2015, we started an additional 3-week summer online research program where high school students and their college coaches learned about the basics of research and did a literature review project. Through virtual sessions, the students learned about human subject research, research ethics, health disparities, basic statistics, and how to do a literature search.

Literature Review Project

For both the on-site and online programs, the high school students were divided into groups, and under the mentorship of their college or medical student coach, they performed a literature review on a topic. They learned how to form a hypothesis, use various reputable biomedical search engines, collect data, and write their results and conclusion in a research paper format. At the end of the program, the participants presented their research to faculty and other student participants. An abstract was submitted by the coach to a national or regional conference for presentation/publication. The college coach was the abstract’s first author, and the high school students were co-authors.