NIMBioS is pleased to announce the 16 undergraduate student participants selected for its highly competitive 2020 Summer Research Experience (SRE) program. Participants were selected from a pool of more than 100 applicants from across the U.S. Due to COVID-19 travel and distancing guidelines, this year’s program will be a first, in that it will be conducted remotely and will run for four weeks, from June 1– 30, 2020.
Participants will work in teams with NIMBioS postdocs and UT faculty on five research projects at the interface of mathematics and biology.
2020 SRE participants and their assigned team projects are as follows:
Laurinne Balstad (Mathematics, Biology, Saint Olaf College), Jackie Folmar (Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, Yale Univ.), and Abigail Sallee (Biochemistry and Cellular & Molecular Biology, Univ. of Tennessee, Knoxville) will collaborate on a project developing an individual-based model to explain the co-evolutionary dynamics of quorum sensing and biofilms.
Matthew Clark (Computer Science, Mathematics, Fisk Univ.), Chelsea Seggern (Kinesiology, Univ. of Tennessee, Knoxville), and Anna Thomas (Mathematics, Computer Science, Lehigh Univ.) will be working on agent-based simulations of Caenorhabditis elegans.
Charlotte Beckford (Mathematics, Fordham Univ.), Elliott Smith (Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, Univ. of Michigan), and Amy Tian (Biology, Public Policy, Univ. of Chicago) will team up to investigate the influence of climate change velocity on future species distributions.
Umang Joshi (Biology, Computer Science, Xavier Univ.), Michael Lin (Biophysics, Johns Hopkins Univ.), and Stephanie Westaway (Physics, Mathematics, Samford Univ.) will work on a project modeling the effects of pathogenic bacteria on phytoplankton community mortality.
Spencer Catron (Mathematics, Physics, Univ. of Tennessee, Knoxville), Sarah Roth (Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, Univ. of Tennessee, Knoxville), Savannah Rumley (Biochemistry, Molecular Biology, Fisk Univ.), and Francesca Zumpano (Mathematics, Statistics, College of New Jersey) will work to model the individual and population effects of elevated incubation temperatures of sea turtles.
To read more about the NIMBioS SRE program, visit https://legacy.nimbios.org/sre/sre2020.