To combat educational and health disparities, out-of-school-time (OST) STEM enrichment programs provide services to underserved youth to encourage them to pursue college and health careers. This article describes a study conducted to determine if the Health Sciences and Technology Academy (HSTA) program participants who receive year-round educational interventions to prepare them for STEM and health sciences majors performed better on the West Virginia Educational Standards Test (WESTEST2) than non-participants. This study provides descriptive and inferential statistics, specifically one-way ANOVAs with one-to-one matching based on grade level, gender, race, and GPA at the end of the 8th grade year for 336 students. Statistically significant differences were found favoring HSTA participants on the WESTEST2 math and reading/language scores. * Health professions degrees include associates degrees and professional degrees.

The Health Sciences and Technology Academy's, (HSTA) goals are to increase college attendance of African American, financially disadvantaged, first generation college and rural Appalachian youth and increase health-care providers and STEM professionals in underserved communities. Students enter in the 9th grade and remain in HSTA four years. They engage in a rigorous academic program within the nurturing environment of small after-school clubs punctuated by yearly summer camps on multiple college campuses. A distinctive piece of HSTA is its students' development of research projects under the mentorship of teachers and researchers that examine and address health issues faced by their communities. The projects help HSTA students to understand the health dynamics in their local community, transforming them into community advocates who address health and social issues at home as they prepare to move on to college and beyond. Substantial in-state tuition waivers inspire 99% of the 3,021 HSTA graduates to attend college versus 56% of WV high school graduates. Approximately 85% of matriculating HSTA students graduate with a four-year degree or higher versus less than 50% of all college entrants. To date, 57% of HSTA students go into health and other STEM majors, much higher than the state and national figures.

This paper explores the dynamics of a research partnership between a practicing clinician/research and 34 West Virginia high school students participating in a precollege STEM intervention program. The collaboration provided a more diverse study sample to the clinician for examining attitudes about knee osteoarthritis in adults over 40. It provided students the opportunity to collect data from adults in their community within a highly structured research project and explore a range of research questions using the resulting cross-state data set. Data collection far surpassed the researcher's expectations of 100 surveys; student researchers collected 1,129 unique surveys over nine months from difficult to reach Appalachian communities. This project illustrates the intervention program's ability to support partner research efforts while opening the STEM pipeline to under-served youth by introducing aspects of community-based participatory research (CBPR) pathways to them in their formative years. An Opportunity for Collaboration. Dr. Zbehlik was interested in finding ways to improve outcomes of OA care through increased activity and weight loss. Knee OA is a leading cause of mobility impairment in the United States, and its associated costs are staggering. In 2011, they reached $14.8 billion dollars, making OA the second-most expensive hospital-treated condition that year (Stranges et al., 2008). Our nation's aging population and rising obesity rates contribute to the increasing prevalence of knee OA, the disabling variant of arthritis examined in Dr. Zbehlik's research. Many adults with knee OA do not exercise, although data strongly supports exercise for pain relief in this population (Messier et al., 2013). Weight loss also decreases pain significantly and can prevent progression of disease (Felson et al., 1997). However, there is a perceived gap in understand

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