FIRST is the largest and longest continuously-running biomedical postdoctoral training program in the nation. 

The program is a historic collaboration between Emory University and the HBCU’s of the Atlanta University Center: Morehouse, Spelman, Clark Atlanta, and the Morehouse School of Medicine and is funded out of the Institutional Research and Academic Career Development Awards program of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences at the NIH.  FIRST and other IRACDA programs fill a vital niche that was previously crucially missing from the path to top careers in science: postdoctoral fellowships with built-in strong and intentional academic community and mentorship.  Such programs attract and benefit everyone, but especially women and underrepresented groups.

FIRST integrates rigorous training and mentoring in research with similarly rigorous experiences in teaching at the HBCU’s.  While the diversity of the program is striking— nearly half of the ~200 FIRST alumni are African-American and three-quarters are women— what makes FIRST successful, as reported by the fellows, is the socio-intellectual community and network that the program creates. This ‘community effect’ helps explain why virtually all FIRST alumni are still active in science— as professors, researchers, educators, and policy makers— at a rate 25X the national average for African-Americans and 2X that for women.

Half of FIRST fellows consistently report that they would not have continued in science at all if not for a program like FIRST.