BBSI:The Bioinformatics and Bioengineering Summer Institute at VCU

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This award provides support for a three year continuing award, a renewal of the NIBIB-NSF Bioengineering and Bioinformatics Summer Institutes (BBSI) Program at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), entitled, BBSI: The Bioinformatics and Bioengineering Summer Institute at VCU, under the direction of Dr. Gregory A. Buck. The VCU BBSI will continue to provide broad exposure to the interdisciplinary fields of bioengineering and bioinformatics for approximately 22 (12-14 entering and 10-12 returning) upper level undergraduate students, each summer for ten weeks. A total of 66 students will be supported by this program over the next three years. The goal of the VCU BBSI is to show future engineers and scientists that the integrative interdisciplinary fields of bioinformatics and bioengineering represent exciting, rewarding, and very viable long term options for a career in research. The intellectual focus of the VCU BBSI will be to lead students through a series of highly integrated intensive research simulations, inspired by actual problems from their VCU host laboratories over a two successive summer programs. Core skills such as computational and mathematical methods integrate, across disciplines and research areas, the analytical and methodological skills of the Institute participants. Students will also interact with the scientific community through carefully prepared experiences with visiting scientists and engineers. Students will also take primary responsibility for their research projects and delve more deeply into the scientific basis of their work by teaching their peers. The broader impact of the VCU BBSI is seen in its efforts to integrate cutting-edge research and educational experience through recently launched comprehensive new Bachelor's and Master's Programs in Bioinformatics and a Bioinformatics track in the new Ph.D. in Integrative Life Sciences. The newly created School of Engineering is one of few in the country to focus on Bioengineering, and houses a newly focused department of Chemistry and Life Sciences Engineering. This program is being co-funded by the Directorate for Biological Sciences (BIO)/Division of Biological Infrastructure (DBI)/Biological Databases and Informatics (BDI), the Directorate for Engineering (ENG)/Division of Engineering Education and Centers (EEC), and the National Institutes of Health/National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB). VCU has a tradition of training non-traditional and underrepresented populations, and that tradition is reflected in the goals of the BBSI.