The goal of this project is to develop at the Georgia Institute of Technology the interdisciplinary undergraduate research programs in Quantitative System Biology (QSB) and Mathematical Biology (MB). The project combines interdisciplinary research experiences for advanced undergraduate students in biology and mathematics with the development of curriculums of interdisciplinary concentration areas leading to formal QSB certificate for Biology majors and MB certificate for Math majors. We define Systems Biology as an approach to studying biological systems that treats them as a whole rather than merely components. This idea has become a paradigm of the contemporary biological research from molecular and cell biology to ecology. With computers and computational tools facilitating exchange of information and system modeling become ubiquitous in biological research, it is anticipated that all aspects of biology in the next decade will embrace the system biology approach. Mathematics has played a large historical role in biology, from the Hodgkin-Huxley model of action potentials to the Lotka-Volterra models in ecology. Its role can only become larger as computational and data-gathering technologies improve. Genome sequencing is revolutionizing biology by providing large volumes of genetic data. The goal of bioinformatics is to provide computer-based methods for getting insights into biological mechanisms underlying the ever-increasing amount of high-throughput genomic data. The field presents one of the grand challenges of our times, with both a large basic research aspect as well as important practical applications. With the pre-genomic era characterized by the effort to sequence the human and other most important genomes just completed, we are now entering the more difficult post-genomic era that concentrates on understanding the genomic texts. Educating the next generation of researchers will play a critical role in the success of this endeavor. Biologists will need to be able to use existing tools, understand their foundations, and build the new tools. Therefore, we seek to prepare our undergraduate students for this "biocomplex future" in all sub-disciplines of biology. We advocate neither a naive reductionism ("the whole doesn't matter") nor a naive holism ("the parts don't matter"). Instead, we suggest a balanced approach that uses mathematical and computational models to integrate small-scale biological data to predict whole-system behavior and computational and statistical approaches to extract biological insights from large-scale biological data. There is a continuous spectrum of researchers linking mathematics and biology. We seek to help students find their place along this spectrum and give them rigorous training in their chosen discipline and enough exposure to "neighboring" disciplines to allow meaningful collaboration, followed by real interdisciplinary research experiences.
The new educational and research training initiative at Georgia Tech: Development and implementation of the interdisciplinary undergraduate programs in Quantitative Systems Biology (QSB) and Mathematical Biology (MB) will use interdisciplinary research-driven strategies to increase access to quality biological science and applied mathematics for talented undergraduate students. The specific goals of the QSB and MB programs are (i) enhancing undergraduate research in quantitative and mathematical biology as well as teaching and learning of these disciplines; (ii) expanding participation in these new interdisciplinary programs through attracting qualified and capable undergraduates. To meet these goals, we will establish and add to the current biology and math curriculums new concentration areas focused on Quantitative Systems Biology and Mathematical Biology, and bring together math and biology students and faculty in yearlong research projects. The core of our project are academic-year and summer interdisciplinary research projects conducted by teams of two to four advanced undergraduates from both biology and mathematics, supervised by either a pair of biology and mathematics mentors or a single mentor already working at the bio-math interface. Through these projects, students will get a good taste of one particular sub-discipline of biology, gain real hands-on experience in research, and learn effective ways to collaborate with others with complementary backgrounds. Students will be able to begin research projects in their third year, and therefore could participate in more than one project to try different things or they could stay on one project to become an expert in that area. Implementation of this plan will contribute to reaching an educational goal of the nation wide scale, providing advanced training for future researchers in human health and medicine.
