About
The Quantitative Biology Undergraduate Summer Research Program offered summer research fellowships to undergraduates from 2019-2023. If interested in this program, please apply to the NSF Quantitative Biology REU Site Program at Northwestern. This program allowed undergraduate students majoring in biology, engineering, mathematics, statistics, or physics to participate in hands-on laboratory or computational research that applies mathematical concepts and methodology to understanding mechanisms in biology. If selected, leadership will match you with a faculty mentor.
Participants attended activities such as, weekly workshops covering communication, design, ethics, teamwork, and entrepreneurship; a day trip to a local museum or Argonne National Laboratory; a presentation on applying to graduate school; and other cohort outings.
This program was supported by the NSF-Simons Center for Quantitative Biology and the Northwestern Research Training Grant in Quantitative Biological Modeling.
Application
Please follow the link here to the full application instructions. https://northwestern.edu/quantitativebiologyreu/application/
Stipend
Participants in the program received a taxable stipend of approximately $4,500. Travel, housing and meals were not supported by this program. Housing resources can be found at https://www.northwestern.edu/offcampus/housing/find-housing/index.html 
Eligibility
To be considered for this program, applicants had to be currently be enrolled as a freshman, sophomore, or junior with demonstrated interests in the life sciences, engineering, mathematics, statistics, or physics. Open to US citizens or permanent residents.
Expectations
- Participants were expected to spend 37.5 hours a week researching with a participating faculty member’s research group for 8-weeks between June 19 – August 12, 2023. (Dates can be flexible to accommodate your university/college’s spring term/quarter end date and fall term/quarter start date.)
- Participants agreed not to take on any other research grants for any part of the eight-week period, and must not be enrolled in courses for any part of that period.
- Participants presented at the end of summer symposium. Presentation options are a 15-minute slide presentation, a 3-minute recorded video, or a poster presentation. Symposium will include program directors, investigators, scholars, and members.
See an example summer program schedule here.
The 2020 Virtual Summer Program Schedule: 2020_Virtual_SURP_Schedule
Student Experience
Read about alumna Annamarie Leske’s experience in blog post, “How to apply to and thrive in quantitative biology REUs”, https://blogs.ams.org/mathmentoringnetwork/
Example Undergraduate Summer Projects from the 2020 Virtual Program
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Olivia Dunne, The University of Chicago |
| Gabriel Petersen, Northwestern University Mathematics of t-SNE and PCA Mentor: Antonio Auffinger |
| Sean Jordan, University of Maryland The Empirical Embedding Statistic Mentors: William Kath, Madhav Mani, Eric Johnson |
| Kelly Paquin, The Ohio State University Cycle Detection of Circadian genes of Drosophila through luciferase expression Mentor: William Kath, Ravi Allada, Bridget Lear, Elan Ness-Cohn |
| Nathan Burg, University of Illinois – Chicago Morphogenic Impact of Disrupting the Gene Regulatory Network Underpinning Drosophila Compound Eye Development Mentors: Richard Carthew, Kevin Gallagher |
| Saurav Kiri, New College of Florida Differential Analysis and Translation Efficiency Analysis of Ribo-Seq Data Mentors: Jiping Wang, Alec Wang, Matthew Hope, Keren Li |
| Rohan Mehra, Rutgers University Analyzing Gene Expression Level Difference in Single-Cell Hematopoietic Cells Stem Cells between Aged and Young Donors Mentors: Jonathan Desponds, William Kath |
| Karan Gowda, Northwestern University Investigation of the level of natural variance in conserved insulin signaling pathway Mentors: Eric Andersen, Gaotian Zhang |
Recommendations
Here are a few recommendations to further support your application and your exploration into quantitative biology.
- During the academic year participate in an independent research project with a faculty member at your home institution.
- Take online tutorials (e.g. Data Camp, Coursera) and/or basic computer science courses in programming. The most used programming languages are Matlab, R, Python, C++, and Java.
- For Math majors, take a fundamental course in general, cell, or developmental biology.
- For Biology majors, take a fundamental course in statistics.
Participating Faculty Mentors
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Associate Professor, Engineering Sciences and Applied Mathematics, McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science |
NSF-Simons Fellow, NSF-Simons Center for Quantitative Biology |
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Chair and Professor, Neurobiology; Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences; Project 3 Leader, NSF-Simons Center for Quantitative Biology |
Professor of Engineering Sciences and Applied Mathematics, McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science; Professor of Neurobiology, Weinberg College of Arts and Science; Co-Director and Project 3 Leader, NSF-Simons Center for Quantitative Biology |
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Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering, McCormick School of Engineering; Professor of Molecular Biosciences and Physics & Astronomy, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences; Professor of Medicine, Feinberg School of Medicine; Investigator, NSF-Simons Center for Quantitative Biology |
Assistant Professor of Engineering Sciences and Applied Mathematics, McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science; Assistant Professor of Molecular Biosciences, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences; Project 1 & 4 Leader, NSF-Simons Center for Quantitative Biology |
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Assistant Professor of Molecular Biosciences, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences; Project 2 Leader, NSF-Simons Center for Quantitative Biology |
Chair and Professor of Molecular Biosciences, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences; Project 1 Leader, NSF-Simons Center for Quantitative Biology |
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Associate Professor of Mathematics, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences; Investigator, NSF-Simons Center for Quantitative Biology |
Assistant Professor of Molecular Biosciences, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences |
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Assistant Professor of Preventive Medicine, Feinberg School of Medicine; Project 3 Leader, NSF-Simons Center for Quantitative Biology |
Assistant Professor of Engineering Sciences and Applied Mathematics, McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science; Project 2 Leader, NSF-Simons Center for Quantitative Biology |
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Professor of Molecular Biosciences, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences; Director and Project 4 Leader, NSF-Simons Center for Quantitative Biology |
Professor of Engineering Sciences and Applied Mathematics, McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science |
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Associate Professor of Neurobiology, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences |
Associate Professor of Molecular Biosciences, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences; Project 5 Leader, NSF-Simons Center for Quantitative Biology |
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NSF-Simons Fellow, NSF-Simons Center for Quantitative Biology |
Professor of Statistics and Professor of Molecular Biosciences, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences; Project 2 & 5 Leader, NSF-Simons Center for Quantitative Biology |
Alumni
2021 Cohort
Chloe Chen, Carnegie Mellon University
Matthew Cummings, University of Dayton
Sophie Furlow, Northwestern University
Annamarie Leske, North Carolina State University
May Nguyen, Northwestern University
Matthew Sak, University of Kentucky
Mete Yuksel, University of Idaho
Isabel Zhong, Northwestern University
2020 Cohort
Nathan Burg, University of Illinois, Chicago
Olivia Dunne, University of Chicago
Karan Gowda, Northwestern University
William He, Northwestern University
Brian Hsu, Northwestern University
Sean Jordan, University of Maryland
Saurav Kiri, New College of Florida
Christopher Lee, Northwestern University
Rohan Mehra, Rutgers University
Kelly Paquin, The Ohio State University
Gabriel Petersen, Northwestern University
2019 Cohort
Zachary Crispino, Cornell University
Robby Gray, Northwestern University
Christina Goss, Northwestern University
Iurii Gurkov, Hunter College CUNY
Alain Kangabire, Northwestern University
Zayn Kayali, University of Wisconsin – Madison
Sanheet Kodimala, Northwestern University
Wenjie Li, Washington University St Louis
Angelica Lopez, University of Wisconsin – Madison
Sophia Nehs, University of Wisconsin – Madison
Nathan White, Northwestern University
Zihan Wu, Northwestern University
