REU site: Animal Behavior in Context

About This Grant

This REU Site award to Indiana University, located in Bloomington, IN, 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 and contribute to development of the US STEM workforce. The theme of the site is behavioral biology and the influence of context on decision-making. Students will be engaged in research investigating how animals make social and non-social decisions based on external events, their internal state, and their past experiences. Students will explore these issues by conducting novel research projects in their host labs. Students will also participate in professional development workshops. All these experiences make students highly competitive for future career opportunities in research, biomedicine, and industry. Many students will present the results of their work at scientific conferences. The effectiveness of the REU site will be assessed using student feedback and tracking the career path and publication record of program participants. Students should apply to the REU site using NSF ETAP (Education and Training Application: https://etap.nsf.gov). The REU program is hosted by the Center for the Integrative Study of Animal Behavior, an interdisciplinary group at Indiana University. A view of context as behaviorally informative leads to new insight into the capabilities of animals for behavioral plasticity and lends itself to groundbreaking research in the mechanisms of behavioral decision-making. Students will pursue this theme in departments of Biology, Psychology, Anthropology, and Cognitive Science. They will use a wide range of approaches including AI- assisted behavioral analysis, genomic analysis, endocrine measurement and manipulation, and anatomical and physiological neuroscience. They will use animal models including insects, fish, frogs, birds, and rodents. They will work on topics including the mechanisms and generational trajectories of social behaviors like aggression and communication, or on environmentally cued switches in transcriptomes and behavior. In addition to research, interns will attend faculty research presentations, research ethics and other professional skills training, journal clubs, a GRE prep course, panels about graduate school, and tours focused on a range of career options. 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.