June 21, 2003

Last modified June 21, 2003 - 1:20 am

By MARY PICKETT
Of The Gazette Staff

When they asked Montana State University in Bozeman for help, MSU set up programs to encourage Indian high-school students to go on to college to study sciences and math, give Indian university students experience in biomedical research and deepen training for reservation science teachers.

About 450 students and scores of teachers have participated in programs through the American Indian Research Opportunities office since it began in 1980. Many of those students have gone on to become doctors, nurses, nutritionists, veterinarians, geologists, engineers and science teachers, said Sara Young, AIRO director.

AIRO is a cooperative effort between Montana's seven tribal colleges and MSU and serves as the umbrella organization for several programs, including:

• The Minority Apprentice Program, which brings high-school students to the MSU campus for six weeks during the summer to work with faculty mentors in biomedical and other health-related research. Reservation teachers also come to MSU to learn how to incorporate university research into their classrooms.

This year, MAP will include a program funded through a Hewlett-Packard grant that will give students training in computer science and engineering.

• Explorations in Biomedicine, which trains reservation middle- and high-school teachers and tribal-college faculty members in physiology.

• Initiative for Minority Student Development, which funds university students, mostly undergraduates, to work on MSU biomedical research projects and present their findings at scientific meetings.

The MSU class of 2001 had a particularly high number of successful IMSD students.

Three students from that class are finishing up their second year in medical school. Michelle Show from the Fort Belknap Reservation is at the University of Washington. Tucker Harris of Clancy, a Little Shell-Chippewa from Clancy, and Neil Sun Rhodes, of the Fort Peck Reservation, are both at Portland State University.

Show graduated from MSU with highest honors and Sun Rhodes with high honors in microbiology.

Gerlinda Morrison of Crow Agency, another 2001 graduate, is in a Ph.D. physical-therapy program at the University of Montana.

Jewel Payne from Fort Peck is working on master's degrees in public health and nutrition at the University of California at Berkeley. While at MSU, Payne developed a healthier fry bread using barley flour. She also spend a summer doing research at Harvard University.

Most, but not all, AIRO students are from Montana.

Raelene Zospah, a Navajo from New Mexico, graduated from MSU this spring with a degree in chemistry. This fall she will go to the University of Oklahoma for a year to research rheumatoid arthritis among American Indians. During the year, she'll be applying to medical schools and plans a career in research and clinical medicine.

While at MSU, Zospah spent time on molecular biology research through the AIRO.

That research has been a "huge" part of her undergraduate education, she said.

AIRO programs are funded largely through the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation. This year, the MAP program also is receiving part of a $1.2-million grant to MSU from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase, Md.

In the future, Young would like to have a post-baccalaureate program that funds students' research for a year or two before they go to graduate school. She also would like to have students do research in foreign countries some day.

Young has been AIRO director for more than six years. An enrolled member of the Crow Tribe, she graduated from high school at Lodge Grass and received education degrees from Eastern Montana College, now Montana State University-Billings, and MSU in Bozeman. She has worked as a teacher, principal and school superintendent.

For her work with AIRO, Young was chosen to be one of 10 people receiving the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Math and Engineering Mentoring earlier this year.

Young is using part of the $10,000 grant from that award to organize the first reunion of all former students and teachers participating in AIRO programs, including the MAP, IMSD and other programs, such as Minority Biomedicine Research Services and Minority Access to Research Careers.

The reunion will be July 23-24 at MSU in Bozeman.