REU Site: Research Training in Systems and Quantitative Biology

About This Grant

This REU Site award to Yale University, located in New Haven, CT, will support the training of 10 students for 10 weeks during the summers of 2025-2027. It is anticipated that a total of 30 students, primarily from schools with limited research opportunities, will be trained in the program. The objective of this program is to provide undergraduate students with hands-on interdisciplinary research experiences in systems and quantitative biology at a large research institution to prepare them to pursue careers in STEM. REU students will learn how to apply principles and techniques from the physical sciences and engineering to address important open questions in biology, building the critical thinking skills necessary to perform innovative research. Students will also develop their written and oral communication skills for both scientific and broad audiences, and many will present their results at scientific conferences. Assessment of this program will be done through an online Qualtrics survey and participants will be tracked after the program to monitor their career outcomes. Students should apply to the REU site using NSF ETAP (Education and Training Application: https://etap.nsf.gov) for the summers of 2026 and 2027. Characterization of complex biological systems requires an interdisciplinary approach that integrates methods and principles from the physical sciences and engineering with those from biology. Training in quantitative and systems biology allows researchers to investigate the systems-level impact of each biological perturbation at the molecular and cellular scales. This REU Site will introduce participants to three research areas: quantitative biological imaging, computational modeling of biological systems, and systems biology. Students will be mentored by faculty across 15 departments at Yale, including Physics, Biomedical Engineering, Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry, Chemistry, Computational Biology and Biomedical Informatics, and Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology. Students will conduct research in a laboratory that fits their interests and will receive supportive one-on-one mentoring by REU faculty, graduate students, and postdoctoral laboratory mentors. Through their research and other program activities, participants will deepen their understanding of interdisciplinary research in systems and quantitative biology and how computational and experimental approaches synergize to drive innovation in these fields. This site is supported by the Department of Defense in partnership with the NSF REU program. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.