Achievement

A new project developed from an IGERT training effort. A computer science major began a life sciences doctoral program and, since she had little biology background, we arranged for her to start two months early to audit an organic chemistry class and do research in a biochemistry lab. She has excelled in the program as a result and made notable contributions to the biochemistry research.

She was able to identify several methods to improve their computational efforts, which in turn, led to better design of the experimental efforts. She was taught about nitrogen fixation in soybeans and the importance of ammonia permeability. A critical component of this research is the calculation of that parameter, and our student identified a potentially more accurate methodology to do so. The faculty advisor felt that these insights warranted further exploration, and a new interdisciplinary computational project to evaluate the method has been developed with our student as the lead.