The Edward A. Bouchet Fellowship Program is named in honor of Yale’s first African-American graduate and the first African-American in the United States to earn a PhD. The Bouchet Fellowship is designed to increase the number of minority students and others with a demonstrated commitment to eradicating racial disparities, who will purse PhDs and subsequent careers in academia.
The Edward A. Bouchet Undergraduate Fellowship Program is an effort to increase the pool of young people qualified to meet the needs of educational institutions into the next century. Similar to the statements made by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation with respect to a similar fellowship program administered in Yale College, “the [Edward A. Bouchet] program aims to reduce over time the serious under-representation of individuals from certain minority groups at the faculty level, as well as to address the attendant educational consequences of these disparities. The program serves the related goals of structuring campus environments so that they will become more conducive to improved racial and ethnic relations, and of providing role models for all youth.” The Fellowship allows students to work on paid research projects during the academic year, and to pursue full-time research during the summers between sophomore and junior years, and between junior and senior years.