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Beginning June 19, 2023

Quantitative Biology Undergraduate Summer Research Program

About

The Quantitative Biology Undergraduate Summer Research Program offered summer research fellowships to undergraduates from 2019-2023. If interested in this program, please apply to the NSF Quantitative Biology REU Site Program at Northwestern. This program allowed undergraduate students majoring in biology, engineering, mathematics, statistics, or physics to participate in hands-on laboratory or computational research that applies mathematical concepts and methodology to understanding mechanisms in biology. If selected, leadership will match you with a faculty mentor.

Participants attended activities such as, weekly workshops covering communication, design, ethics, teamwork, and entrepreneurship; a day trip to a local museum or Argonne National Laboratory; a presentation on applying to graduate school; and other cohort outings.

This program was supported by the NSF-Simons Center for Quantitative Biology and the Northwestern Research Training Grant in Quantitative Biological Modeling. 

Application 

Please follow the link here to the full application instructions.  https://northwestern.edu/quantitativebiologyreu/application/

Stipend

Participants in the program received a taxable stipend of approximately $4,500.  Travel, housing and meals were not supported by this program. Housing resources can be found at https://www.northwestern.edu/offcampus/housing/find-housing/index.html 

Eligibility

To be considered for this program, applicants had to be currently be enrolled as a freshman, sophomore, or junior with demonstrated interests in the life sciences, engineering, mathematics, statistics, or physics. Open to US citizens or permanent residents.

Expectations

  • Participants were expected to spend 37.5 hours a week researching with a participating faculty member’s research group for 8-weeks between June 19 – August 12, 2023. (Dates can be flexible to accommodate your university/college’s spring term/quarter end date and fall term/quarter start date.)
  • Participants agreed not to take on any other research grants for any part of the eight-week period, and must not be enrolled in courses for any part of that period.
  • Participants presented at the end of summer symposium. Presentation options are a 15-minute slide presentation, a 3-minute recorded video, or a poster presentation. Symposium will include program directors, investigators, scholars, and members.
See an example summer program schedule here.

The 2020 Virtual Summer Program Schedule: 2020_Virtual_SURP_Schedule

Student Experience

Read about alumna Annamarie Leske’s experience in blog post, “How to apply to and thrive in quantitative biology REUs”, https://blogs.ams.org/mathmentoringnetwork/

Portrait image of alumna Annamarie Leske

Example Undergraduate Summer Projects from the 2020 Virtual Program

Olivia Dunne, The University of Chicago
Studying Pattern Formation in Zebrafish Stripes
Mentor: Alexandria Volkening

Gabriel Petersen, Northwestern University
Mathematics of t-SNE and PCA
Mentor: Antonio Auffinger
Sean Jordan, University of Maryland
The Empirical Embedding Statistic
Mentors: William Kath, Madhav Mani, Eric Johnson
Kelly Paquin, The Ohio State University
Cycle Detection of Circadian genes of Drosophila through luciferase expression
Mentor: William Kath, Ravi Allada, Bridget Lear, Elan Ness-Cohn
Nathan Burg, University of Illinois – Chicago
Morphogenic Impact of Disrupting the Gene Regulatory Network Underpinning Drosophila Compound Eye Development
Mentors: Richard Carthew, Kevin Gallagher
Saurav Kiri, New College of Florida
Differential Analysis and Translation Efficiency Analysis of Ribo-Seq Data
Mentors: Jiping Wang, Alec Wang, Matthew Hope, Keren Li
Rohan Mehra, Rutgers University
Analyzing Gene Expression Level Difference in Single-Cell Hematopoietic Cells Stem Cells between Aged and Young Donors
Mentors: Jonathan Desponds, William Kath
Karan Gowda, Northwestern University
Investigation of the level of natural variance in conserved insulin signaling pathway
Mentors: Eric Andersen, Gaotian Zhang

Recommendations

Here are a few recommendations to further support your application and your exploration into quantitative biology.

  • During the academic year participate in an independent research project with a faculty member at your home institution.
  • Take online tutorials (e.g. Data Camp, Coursera) and/or basic computer science courses in programming. The most used programming languages are Matlab, R, Python, C++, and Java.
  • For Math majors, take a fundamental course in general, cell, or developmental biology.
  • For Biology majors, take a fundamental course in statistics.

Participating Faculty Mentors

Danny Abrams

Associate Professor, Engineering Sciences and Applied Mathematics, McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science

Cody FitzGerald

NSF-Simons Fellow, NSF-Simons Center for Quantitative Biology

Ravi Allada

Chair and Professor, Neurobiology; Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences; Project 3 Leader, NSF-Simons Center for Quantitative Biology

Bill Kath

Professor of Engineering Sciences and Applied Mathematics, McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science; Professor of Neurobiology, Weinberg College of Arts and Science; Co-Director and Project 3 Leader, NSF-Simons Center for Quantitative Biology

Luis Amaral

Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering, McCormick School of Engineering; Professor of Molecular Biosciences and Physics & Astronomy, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences; Professor of Medicine, Feinberg School of Medicine; Investigator, NSF-Simons Center for Quantitative Biology

Madhav Mani

Assistant Professor of Engineering Sciences and Applied Mathematics, McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science; Assistant Professor of Molecular Biosciences, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences; Project 1 & 4 Leader, NSF-Simons Center for Quantitative Biology

Erik Andersen

Assistant Professor of Molecular Biosciences, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences; Project 2 Leader, NSF-Simons Center for Quantitative Biology

Carole LaBonne

Chair and Professor of Molecular Biosciences, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences; Project 1 Leader, NSF-Simons Center for Quantitative Biology

Antonio Auffinger

Associate Professor of Mathematics, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences; Investigator, NSF-Simons Center for Quantitative Biology

Keara Lane

Assistant Professor of Molecular Biosciences, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences

Rosemary Braun

Assistant Professor of Preventive Medicine, Feinberg School of Medicine; Project 3 Leader, NSF-Simons Center for Quantitative Biology

Niall Mangan

Assistant Professor of Engineering Sciences and Applied Mathematics, McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science; Project 2 Leader, NSF-Simons Center for Quantitative Biology

Richard Carthew

Professor of Molecular Biosciences, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences; Director and Project 4 Leader, NSF-Simons Center for Quantitative Biology

Hermann Riecke

Professor of Engineering Sciences and Applied Mathematics, McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science

Dan Dombeck

Associate Professor of Neurobiology, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences

Alec Wang

Associate Professor of Molecular Biosciences, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences; Project 5 Leader, NSF-Simons Center for Quantitative Biology

Joel Dokmegang

NSF-Simons Fellow, NSF-Simons Center for Quantitative Biology

JiPing Wang

Professor of Statistics and Professor of Molecular Biosciences, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences; Project 2 & 5 Leader, NSF-Simons Center for Quantitative Biology

Alumni

2021 Cohort

Chloe Chen, Carnegie Mellon University
Matthew Cummings, University of Dayton
Sophie Furlow, Northwestern University
Annamarie Leske, North Carolina State University
May Nguyen, Northwestern University
Matthew Sak, University of Kentucky
Mete Yuksel, University of Idaho
Isabel Zhong, Northwestern University

2020 Cohort

Nathan Burg, University of Illinois, Chicago
Olivia Dunne, University of Chicago
Karan Gowda, Northwestern University
William He, Northwestern University
Brian Hsu, Northwestern University
Sean Jordan, University of Maryland
Saurav Kiri, New College of Florida
Christopher Lee, Northwestern University
Rohan Mehra, Rutgers University
Kelly Paquin, The Ohio State University
Gabriel Petersen, Northwestern University

2019 Cohort

Zachary Crispino, Cornell University
Robby Gray, Northwestern University
Christina Goss, Northwestern University
Iurii Gurkov, Hunter College CUNY
Alain Kangabire, Northwestern University
Zayn Kayali, University of Wisconsin – Madison
Sanheet Kodimala, Northwestern University
Wenjie Li, Washington University St Louis
Angelica Lopez, University of Wisconsin – Madison
Sophia Nehs, University of Wisconsin – Madison
Nathan White, Northwestern University
Zihan Wu, Northwestern University

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