Understanding the context and appreciating the complexity of evaluating the Diversity Program Consortium

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) made a sizeable investment in developing a scientific approach to understanding how to best increase diversity in the NIH-funded workforce by fostering inclusive excellence at a national scale through the Diversity Program Consortium (DPC). This chapter provides an overview of the context in which the consortium-wide evaluation study has taken place to provide readers with an understanding of its level of complexity. This evaluation effort is the first large-scale, national, systemic, longitudinal evaluation of harmonized interventions focused on undergraduate biomedical research training programs in the history of the NIH and the National Institute of General Medical Sciences.