REU Site: Chemistry Research Addressing Biological Problems

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The Division of Chemistry supports this Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) site at Boston University (BU) for the summers of 2007-2009. The program director John Snyder will be assisted by co-PI John Straub in the ten-week summer program. Students will be recruited from undergraduate institutions and community colleges with limited opportunities for undergraduate research and will work on projects that use the basic chemical sciences to address fundamental questions in biological systems. The research ranges across traditional chemical disciplines and includes computer simulations of amyloid peptide aggregation to probe Alzheimer's disease, development of photochemical techniques to detect human pathogenic organisms, and organic syntheses targeting the discovery of novel biological probes and new drug candidates. Training on state-of-the-art instrumentation will allow students to use these tools in their research as needed. Workshops and REU group meetings will illustrate the interrelatedness of the research efforts in solving biological problems. Presentation skills will be honed in meetings of individual research groups as well as within the entire BU undergraduate research community in a summer-ending, multidisciplinary research symposium.