Research Focus Areas

Students participating in the program for four years will be interns for the first two years. During this period, the students will be exposed to mentoring in a research environment, in addition to formal coursework in biology and mathematics. Interactions with a faculty mentors' laboratory group will expose students to research activities, including reading primary literature, developing hypotheses, designing experiments, writing, presenting and evaluating research proposals, data analysis, preparing results for presentation, and perhaps publication. Juniors and seniors will be involved in independent research projects. In the spring of their junior year, students will prepare a research proposal for their summer project and run a mock NSF panel, evaluating and providing peer feedback on each other's proposals. During all four years, students will be involved with the activities of their mentors' laboratories.

The twelve students participating in the program for four years will be divided into three research groups, with four students per group. These groups fit the expertise of our faculty in Biology and Mathematics and Statistics and allow for more personal and interactions between students and faculty members. These research areas are outlined below.

Systematics and Phylogenetic Inference

Muscle Physiology

The Ecology of Host-Parasite Interactions