(taken from application): A summer research experience program is proposed for undergraduates majoring in the physical and computational sciences or engineering, to introduce them to the study of complex biological systems. Students will be recruited to work in the laboratories of ten NIH-funded investigators that are members of an interdisciplinary graduate program in """"""""Structural and Functional Analysis of Complex Biological Systems"""""""". This program is designed to train students to work at the interface between biology and the physical and computational sciences, and involves faculty from the Center for Computational Biology and the Departments of Cell Biology & Neuroscience, Chemistry & Biochemistry, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, Microbiology, and Veterinary Molecular Biology. This program was recently awarded a five-year NSF Interdisciplinary Graduate Education and Research Training (IGERT) graduate training grant. The undergraduate research program proposed here has been designed to integrate with the graduate-training program. Undergraduates will have graduate student mentors from the program, in addition to their faculty mentors. They will also participate in the summer symposia and workshops organized and funded through the NSF-IGERT program, where they will be exposed to distinguished scientists from around the country who are at the forefront of applying computational and systems approaches to biological problems. In addition, there will be weekly seminars and presentations, where the undergraduates will interact with a cohesive group of investigators at MSU that are committed to training students to exploit advanced experimental and computational techniques to understand complex biological systems. By systems, we mean groups of interacting biological components, such as enzymes, substrates, and regulatory agents in a biochemical pathway, macromolecular assemblies of a second-messenger signaling system, gene products and control elements in a genetic network, or nerve cells in a sensory network. By necessity, the education and training of such scientists must be multidisciplinary and will involve computational approaches and bioinformatics. This presents an excellent opportunity for undergraduates with a background in physics, mathematics, computer science, or engineering to apply their quantitative and analytical skills to exciting new problems of biological or medical interest, and develop an interest in pursuing interdisciplinary graduate training.
