REU Site: Interdisciplinary Research Opportunities in Biophysics

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This award supports a new REU site in the Biophysics Department at the University of Michigan. The site will support seven students per year for ten weeks of interdisciplinary research experience at the intersection of chemistry, physics, mathematics and the life sciences. The Biophysics Program at UM is one of very few standalone biophysics programs in the US, created to foster multidisciplinary research and provide interdisciplinary undergraduate and graduate education. Since Biophysics is intellectually extremely diverse, the aim is not only to provide research experience in a subfield of the discipline, but also provide an overview of state-of the-art research in the field, and the experimental methods and techniques that are commonly used. Therefore, the research experience is constructed to have two components: 1) the students will be assigned to the labs that match their interest and are run by experienced researchers to participate innovative scientific exploration, 2) the REU students will participate in hands-on exploration of biophysical methods and techniques (HEBMAT) that will introduce them to various modern experimental and computational research techniques. Upon completion of the program the students will have gained exciting research experience and will have acquired a biophysical toolkit making them more successful and competitive in the scientific and academic environment. This core experience will be augmented by weekly research seminars and workshops, plus opportunities for social interactions, which will often be coordinated with other summer undergraduate research programs to broaden the students' integration into our scientific and professional communities. To match the increasing intellectual diversity of biophysics, the site strongly emphasizes the importance of demographic diversity in the program as a seed for making the field as a whole more diverse in the future. This award is co-funded by the Division of Physics, the Biology Directorate, and the Chemistry Division at the National Science Foundation