Science Fact #1
HHMI: Two Decades of Life Science Support

Wesleyan has been awarded five consecutive grants from the Howard Hughes
Medical Institute. HHMI has supported our undergraduate life science program
since 1988.

In the NSF Survey of Earned Doctorates, during the three-, five-, and ten-year
periods ending in 2004 (the most recent data available), Wesleyan ranks in the top
ten of baccalaureate colleges in the numbers of students going on to obtain the Ph.D.
degree in the sciences.

According to the 2000 to 2004 Survey of Earned Doctorates, women accounted for
nearly 63% of the doctorates received by Wesleyan alumni/ae in the sciences
(calculated either including psychology or including both psychology and the social
sciences) and earned 53% of the doctorates in the sciences when psychology and the
social sciences were excluded. In all sciences combined (including psychology and
social sciences), women account for a great proportion of doctorates earned by
Wesleyan alumni/ae than by alumni/ae from research universities.

In the past decade, eight science faculty have been awarded grants under NSF's
Faculty Early Career Development(CAREER) Program. These are the most
prestigious awards in support of the early career-development activities of
"teacherscholars who most effectively integrate research and education within the context of
the mission of their organization."

Recent data from the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) show that Wesleyan
ranks first among liberal arts colleges (top 16 shown) in science and math
publications for the period 1997-2006.

Wesleyan has received five grants from the NIH to support a Molecular Biophysics
Predoctoral Research Training Program. We are the sole undergraduate liberal arts
college to receive this support among research universities such as Stanford,
University of California at Berkeley, Johns Hopkins, Harvard University Medical
School, Duke, Cornell, and the University of Pennsylvania.

For the classes entering between 1999 and 2003, Wesleyan graduates with overall
grade point averages of 3.5 or above have acceptance rates ranging from 83% to 100%
to medical school. Many of them have been accepted at the most prestigious medical
schools in the country.

According to National Science Foundation (NSF) data on federal funding, we rank
first among our liberal arts peers in federal grants for science.

Among many of our peer and competitor institutions, Wesleyan ranks highest in the
proportion of graduating science majors in 2003 and 2004 who are women.