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UNC MSTAR Application

Applicant selections for summer 2024 are closed. Applications for summer of 2025 will open in mid-October.

2022 UNC MSTAR students in an educational session
2022 UNC MSTAR students in an educational session

The UNC-CH MSTAR Program requires you to contact the training center program coordinator, Kristen Ruck, and to speak with either of the Associate Program Directors (Ellen Roberts, PhD, MPH, or Joshua Niznik, PharmD, PhD) to discuss your research interests and potential mentor choices prior to submitting your application. Contact UNC-CH MSTAR for all information.

Application Deadline

Applications for 2024 are due January 22, 2024 at 8:00 am EST.

Application Preparation

The application contains essay questions. As a result, you may wish to prepare these before completing the Qualtrics survey and submitting your final application. Please use the PDF below to prepare your application for submission.

2024 MSTAR Application Instruction Page

Additional Attachments

IMPORTANT: Please note the following attachments are required.

  1. Your Resume or CV
  2. If you have matched with a UNC research mentor, please have your mentor fill out the Faculty Mentor Form and upload with your application.
  3. If you have matched with a UNC research mentor, please submit your mentor’s UNC MSTAR NIH-style biosketch form and upload with your application.
  4. Letter of academic good standing from the Dean of Student Affairs.

Application Submission

Once you have collected everything you need and are ready to submit, please use the Qualtrics link below to fill in your responses. This Qualtrics tool allows you to navigate back and forth between items. If you exit and return later, then your responses will be saved. However, we strongly recommend you prepare all materials in advance and complete the entire application in one sitting. Once you have submitted the application, you cannot make further changes. Applicant selections for summer 2024 are closed.

Mentor Availability

NOTE: Mentor availability varies year to year. As such, we request that you do not directly contact UNC MSTAR mentors before speaking with the MSTAR manager or advisors.

UNC-Chapel Hill ranks 6th among universities for federally-funded health sciences research. Consequently, we have many research faculty spanning five Health Affairs Schools and the College of Art & Sciences in five campus hospitals and 46 research centers and institutes. This includes 846 research faculty in the School of Medicine alone. Thus the necessity for applicants to speak with a program advisor before applying.

Available mentors have funded research in either active data collection or data analysis phase. Also, available mentors will be moved to unavailable once pre-matched with an applicant. Unavailable mentors may also be in a passive research phase—writing manuscripts, submitting for publication, writing a new research grant, or waiting on research proposal funding.

Questions?

For questions about your application, please contact UNC-CH MSTAR.