Katherine Wilson was the founding director of the CSM SIP program for undergraduates from low-income backgrounds who are at a critical phase of their educational training. Professor Wilson has personally mentored >45 trainees (high school and college students, PhD students, postdocs) as well as visiting scholars from Puerto Rico, Israel and Brazil. America’s innovative biomedical research enterprise depends on our full talent pool including socio-economically under-resourced students. She nurtured this pathway for 14 years as Director of the Johns Hopkins Basic Science Institute’s Summer Internship Program (BSI-SIP) for undergraduates. From 2015 to 2024, she also directed the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine’s NIH-funded PREP (Post-baccalaureate Research Education Program), which provides 1-2 years of fulltime research experience and custom mentoring to students heading towards PhD and MD/PhD careers. These roles provided an outstanding foundation for leading our CSM-SIP program, which successfully mentors low-income undergraduates from colleges in Maryland and nationwide towards careers in medicine and allied healthcare careers. Professor Wilson’s mentoring style also benefited from her experience as a discovery-based researcher studying the cell nucleus, gaining basic knowledge essential to understanding how mutations in nuclear structural proteins cause heart disease, muscular dystrophy, diabetes, metabolic syndrome or accelerated aging.