Nearly 500 students from 11 Washington, D.C.-area schools recently attended "Science Day at NIH" on the National Institutes of Health (NIH) campus in Bethesda, Maryland.

Co-sponsored by the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD), the National Library of Medicine (NLM), the Friends of the NLM, and Mentoring in Medicine, Science Day at NIH promotes diversity in the biomedical workforce.

The overarching goal of the event is to inspire students to explore careers in health care and science. The students—many of them African-American or Latino—participated in hands-on activities and presentations about biomedical research.

"You have to have passion for what you do. If you dislike what you're doing, you will not do a good job," said NIMHD Director Eliseo J. Pérez-Stable, M.D., as he delighted the audience with a journey through his medical and scientific career.

"This is a great opportunity for all of us here at NIH to welcome you and showcase what we do to contribute to the health of society, through biomedical discoveries, through creating new drugs and therapeutics, and to finding new pathways to help people better understand their health and health care," NLM Director Patricia Flatley Brennan, R.N., Ph.D., told the students.

Panelists Kelvin Choi, M.D., of NIMHD; Nakela Cook, M.D., M.P.H., of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute; Jeff Day, M.D., of NLM; and Carla Easter, Ph.D., of the National Human Genome Research Institute shared how passion helped them chart their career paths.

Overall, it was a great day of learning at NIH.