Twenty years ago, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) played a pivotal role in the creation of SUMR by providing the grant that funded its launch. Since then, the SUMR program has maintained close ties with AHRQ's annual National Research Service Award (NRSA) Conference headed up by Francis Chesley, Jr., MD, who hosts the year's SUMR scholars at each NRSA conference. The NRSA program provides health services research grants to postgrads from across the country; the goal is to support projects that help the students develop as independent investigators. For undergrad SUMR scholars, the conference provides a window into the potential next phase of their own development, should they elect to move toward PhD studies after they graduate. 

Chesley is the Director of both the AHRQ offices of Extramural Research, Education and Priority Populations, and Minority and Women's Health. An alum of Georgetown University School of Medicine, he was a protégé of the late John Eisenberg, former Penn Division of General Internal Medicine chief and Georgetown Physician-in-Chief who served as Director of AHRQ from 1997 to 2002.