When Radcliffe College merged with Harvard last October to become the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Science Alliance was discontinued.

Elizabeth D. Chao '01, president of Women in Science at Harvard and Radcliffe (WISHR), said earlier this month that she would like her group to take over where the Science Alliance left off, but that WISHR lacked the full-time staff needed to run such a program.

The Mentors Program was discussed informally earlier this spring at a student-Faculty meeting of the Ann Radcliffe Trust--a grant-awarding body supervised by Lewis and Avery, whose purpose is to fund student groups with an interest in women's issues.

Those present at the Trust meeting placed an emphasis on coordinating the program through the science departments.

"These mentors could serve as a link to the academic departments and enable women in science to feel like more integral members of the academic department," Avery writes. "We have heard from many students that this currently is not their experience."