18 4 / 2011
Apply for Fall 2011 PURA Today!
Apply for the Presidential Undergraduate Research Award (PURA) at Georgia Tech today! Submissions for Fall 2011 are due May 20, 2011 at this link.
A list of things to include in your proposal is included below, courtesy of UROP. Remember that you are writing to an audience that is not necessarily an expert in your field. Please be sure to write so that a well-informed student or faculty member can understand your proposal without looking up more information.
Things to include in proposal:
- Overview of proposed work (proposals should be no more than 2 pages long)
- Objective and goals for the semester
- Related work and any background you know about project
- Methods and techniques to be used, software to be used or developed, types of media or resources to be used
- How any past research in the same area that you participated in relates to this work
- Location of work if not at Georgia Tech
- Name of any co-mentor who is a graduate student or post-doc
- If the project is within an undergraduate team setting describe your individual role and how it relates to the project as a whole
Best of luck with your application!
Michael Chen
Editor-in-Chief
The Tower Undergraduate Research Journal
30 3 / 2011
Computational Biology Research
Not all the research that happens on campus happens in the biomed quad! This is a screenshot of the branches and merges of the codebase I work on in my undergraduate research.
I’m working on a bioinformatics project, with three primary contacts on campus: Dr. Christine Heitsch in the Math department, Dr. David A. Bader in the College of Computing, and Dr. Steve Harvey in the school of Biology.
We’re trying to take an unpaired RNA sequence of A, U, C, and G nucleotides and predict the secondary structure they form, or which bases pair with which other bases. The program we’ve written to do this is called gtfold, which is freely available on GitHub.
As a CS major, my contributions to the project revolve around the code and algorithms that make these predictions. It’s great to have mathematicians, biologists, and computer scientists in the same room working on these problems. We’re hoping to get a new paper presenting the program published soon!
Andrew Ash
Computer Science 2011
www.andrewash.com
