Achievement

Our first student is pursuing a doctoral degree in Life Sciences and completed a research rotation in a computer science lab that taught her text data mining and user interface programming for interacting with large data sets. The results from her research were entitled ‘Using a Literature-based NMF Model for Discovering Gene Functional Relationships’.

She completed a second rotation in a lab combining traditional biochemistry research with computational science. Her research, entitled ‘Identification and Validation of Anion-Quadrupole Interactions’, used customized scripts to calculate the distances, angles, and energies between residues within a protein.

This interdisciplinary experience exemplifies the objectives of the IGERT and should be a model for our first full class of students. These activities further the goal of building bridges between biology departments and computer science faculty and will result in future collaborative projects to fuel graduate student research.