Achievement

The Challenge Project is being run for the second time as part of our revised curriculum. It consists of a two-semester project where first year students, in small teams, conduct bioinformatics research on open-ended problems proposed by biology and medical school faculty using high throughput data. Students work with limited supervision so they can generate their own ideas and approaches as well as seek out expert help. Students make functional predictions, develop computational tools, write progress reports, design validation experiments, and present their findings at our Systems Biology seminar. Teams meet weekly with the course supervisor and their faculty mentors. Teams this year were mentored by 1) David Waxman (BIO), project: Regulatory networks for liver gene expression, 2) Joyce Wong (BME), project: Gene biomarkers for contractile and synthetic vascular smooth muscle cell phenotypes, 3) Joseph Zaia (Biochem), project: Quantification of glycan abundance from mass spec data.