The UPR Río Piedras campus, is soliciting a one year supplemental funding from the Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) to continue the training of 13 MARC U-STAR undergraduate students majoring in chemistry and biology who are all expected to finish their BS degrees in June 2021 and are continuing either to PhD or MD/PhD careers at top stateside universities. Because of the new NIH guidelines on the MARC programs for institutions like ours, the UPR-RP MARC program, after 40 years of successful training of future biomedical researchers, is scheduled to be terminated on May 31, 2020. At this time, thirteen undergraduate students will be left half-way thorough their training as future biomedical researchers. Our aim is for these thirteen students to successfully finish their biomedical research training, graduate with a BS degree, and continue to graduate school as planned. All these undergraduate students are among our top undergraduates with considerable research accomplishments already thanks to NIH-NIGMS support. The program will continue to require a rigorous intramural experience that involves the completion of a specific project and an undergraduate dissertation. External experiences will also be required because they broaden research interests, improve English skills, and establish contacts with future graduate programs. The activities include, among others, making better use of summer experiences, applying to graduate programs more suited to the student needs and provide students with experiences on state of the art instrumentation, which they will use in graduate work.