The Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Wake Forest University School of Biomedical Engineering and Sciences (SBES) and the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute (VBI) are undertaking a collaborative ten week NIBIB-NSF Bioengineering and Bioinformatics Summer Institutes (BBSI) Program entitled, "BBSI Summer Institute for Quantitative and Integrative Bioengineering (SIQIB) to be held at Virginia Tech. This Institute will support a total of 53 undergraduate and graduate students over the four year award period. The intellecutal focus of the program--integrated and quantitative bioengineering--is a common thread throughout both biomedical engineering and bioinformatics, therefore, this Institute will emphasize three major thrusts: computation systems biology, computational bio-imaging, and computational physiology.
The objectives of SIQIB are to: 1) provide targeted students, particularly from underrepresented groups, with quantitative and integrated bioengineering/bioinformatics related educational and research experiences to complement the students existing single discipline programs, and 2) motivate and enable these students to pursue graduate degrees and careers in biomedical engineering and bioinformatics related fields.
SIQIB students will be provided with a ten week, two year multifaceted educational experience that will include in the first year a didactic course in quantitative and integrative analysis; interdisciplinary team projects with faculty mentors from SBES and VBI; workshops on interdisciplinary teams, cyberinfrastructure, professional development, and state-of-the-art computation issues; and a student seminar series and final presentation. Second year activities will focus on a specific thrust area, with advanced course work and workshops, and leadership roles on research projects and seminars.
This project is being co-funded by the Directorate for Education and Human Resources (EHR)/Division of Graduate Education (DGE) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH)/National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB).
