Undergraduate Summer Research Awards from the Lilly Endowment Gift

The Lilly Endowment (LE) Gift to the School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences provides new opportunities for graduate and undergraduate student support. This document describes this program and the application process. The objective of the Lilly Endowment Gift is to support innovative research in one of the following target areas:

1. Medication Safety: a focus on applying systems approaches to improving the safety of current drug distribution and administration systems.
2. Counterfeit Medications: an emphasis on applying modern technological approaches (chemical or electronic signatures) for assuring the integrity of drug products from the point of manufacture to patient administration.
3. Optimization of Drug Manufacturing: an emphasis on methods to develop integrated, predictive models for pharmaceutical processing - particularly the production of drug combination products; all with the aim of reducing the time to introduce innovative and generic drug products to the market.
4. Application of Nanotechnology to Cancer Therapeutics: a focus on the application of nanotechnology to reduce the toxicity of cancer therapeutics agents.

Amounts to Be Awarded

Undergraduate Awards

It is anticipated that the LE gift will provide three undergraduate fellowships per year. However, the awarding committee may alter the number of awards, depending on number or quality of the applicants. Undergraduate summer research fellowships will be funded at the level of $3000 each, with a $1000 faculty or departmental match for a total summer stipend of $4000. The summer research experience will be a ten-week program. The awards committee may provide additional academic year support for especially meritorious undergraduate applicants in the amount of $2000 for a total undergraduate fellowship of $6000 (of which $5000 will come from Lilly funds). The details on this flexibility are addressed below.

Selection Procedure for the Undergraduate Awards

Eligibility

A full-time student in the Pharm.D., prepharmacy, B.S.P.S., or pre-B.S.P.S. programs of the School of Pharmacy may apply. Students must have completed at least one year at Purdue University by the time the award is initiated. The Executive Committee may allow other Purdue students to receive the award if they are working with a School of Pharmacy faculty member in one of the focus areas.

A student may hold only one award concurrently.

A student that has held an award may apply for a subsequent award. A student may receive a maximum of two awards.

Application

The application will be the same as the application for the Dean's Undergraduate Research Program except that the application must be accompanied by a letter from the sponsoring faculty member that describes the project on which the student will work and how it meets the goals of the LE gift. This letter must also indicate a willingness to cost share in the undergraduate award in the amount of $1000.

The student may apply for summer only ($4000 stipend) or for summer plus the following academic year ($6000 stipend). Academic year-only awards will not be available. The review committee may recommend funding for summer only or for summer plus academic year, and this will be dictated not only by the quality of the application but also by availability of funds.

Timeline

The announcement for the LE Undergraduate Awards will be made concurrently with the announcement of the Dean's Summer Undergraduate Awards. The deadline for the award applications will be 5 p.m. Friday, February 29, 2008. The committee will meet in March to determine the awards.

The Review

The awards committee shall consist of one tenure-track faculty member from each department with the Assistant Dean for Graduate Programs as the chair. This committee will be responsible for reviewing both graduate and undergraduate award applications. The review of undergraduate award applications will be based on the student's overall academic record, the student's essay, the student's interest in research as indicated by prior involvement, and the relevance of the proposed project to the LE goals as indicated by the sponsoring professor's statement.

Reports

The student must provide, within thirty days of completion of the award, a short progress report. Because the primary use of the final report will be for stewardship of the Lilly gift, the final report should, as much as possible, place the research accomplishments in the context of the Lilly objectives. The student will be required to participate in an end-of-summer symposium required for other Undergraduate Research Awardees.