Back Story

Nurturing Talent: Created to honor Ronald E. McNair, the heroic astronaut and physicist who perished in the 1986 Challenger disaster, for the past 30 years EWU’s federally funded TRIO/McNair Post-baccalaureate Achievement Program has helped dozens of talented first-generation, low-income and otherwise underrepresented undergraduates prepare for graduate programs that lead to careers as professors and professional researchers. This image, made in the early 2000s, shows McNair Scholar Yolanda Valencia ’02 during a student research presentation. Valencia, now a professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, completed her doctorate at the University of Washington.