Not only is there a lack of access to health care in the Black Belt, there is a lack of health professionals. The training core of Project EXPORT is focused on expanding UA's ongoing efforts to produce physicians and allied health professionals who will be leaders for rural Alabama by helping to develop healthy communities. Dr. John Wheat heads CCHS's three rural scholars programs: Rural Health Scholars, Rural Medical Scholars and the Minority Rural Health Pipeline Program.

"We're interested in increasing the education and training of students, particularly from the Black Belt, and working with them to become the health and science professionals who are needed to advance that part of Alabama," Wheat says. "With Project EXPORT we've been able to offer much-needed scholarships to Black Belt students so they can be included in our special preparatory programs."

Wheat's team is working with two ethicists at the Tuskegee University National Center for Bioethics in Research and Health Care, Dr. Steven Sodeke and Dr. John Stone, who have been making trips to Tuscaloosa to speak to rural medical students about ethics in medicine and research in public health. Wheat says these seminars have been well received and that the two universities have been working to expand their contributions, as well as help to recruit more Black Belt students into UA's programs.

The center was established in remembrance of the U.S. Public Health Services syphilis study, which began in the 1930s and continued until the 1970s.

The next step for the training core is to produce graduate studies specific to rural community health that will be particularly applicable to the Black Belt and to rural Alabama in general.

"We've been using a pre-existing master's course in the College of Human Environmental Science's department of Health Education, but with the EXPORT grant we've decided it should be a bit more specific," Wheat says.

That decision has resulted in a rural health certificate proposal. UA students who will enter medical school next year as Rural Medical Scholars are required to participate in the program. During the next two to three years the plan will develop into a master's degree program.

"We're looking at ways we can partner with Tuskegee to produce students who are committed to this part of the state and have the education to make an impact," Wheat says.