Specific notices for research opportunities for both undergraduate and graduate students are posted below.

Cornell Theory Center Opens Nominations for Summer 2006 Computational Biology Internships

The Cornell Theory Center (CTC) is now accepting nominations for two summer undergraduate internship positions that carry an award of $3,500 each. The internships will be supervised by the nominating faculty members and will be under the auspices of CTC's Computational Biology Service Unit (CBSU). They are offered to reward outstanding students and to assist those students whose current biological research will benefit from CTC's high-performance computing resources. CTC's Windows-based clusters serve the research needs of more than 100 Cornell professors and graduate students who are conducting research in a wide variety of disciplines, including biology, finance, materials, and agriculture. The finished nomination should be approximately one page, with the following information:

Undergraduate name
Email address
Local address
Field of study
Expected date of graduation
Faculty advisor/nominator
Faculty email address
Description of proposed research project and computational requirements
Relevant coursework
Information that highlights the nominee's past accomplishments and outstanding attributes

The nomination should be sent as an attachment to jp86@cornell.edu.

CTC's Undergraduate Summer Internships in Computational Biology are funded through an IBM University Partnership award. Nominations will be reviewed by a committee comprised of Cornell faculty members and members of CBSU. The decision of the review committee will be announced in early May, and the program runs from June through mid-August. In addition to the stipend, the undergraduates receiving the internships will be provided office space in Rhodes Hall and allocated dedicated time on CTC's CBSU cluster. CBSU provides software and hardware support for computational biology applications, as well as assistance in the design and implementation of computational solutions. After completing their internship, the students will discuss the results of their research in a project report and a seminar, which will be scheduled for fall 2006.

Previous internships have used high-performance computing applications in a variety of ways:

to study the structures of proteins in an effort to understand more about proteins in our bodies and how they function;
to extract highly specific and accurate biological predictions pertinent to E. coli without the existing limitations of tedious measurements of kinetic rate constants;
to explore a segment of the X chromosome of the fruit fly, looking for functional genes in a region that was currently considered empty; and
to compare amino acid sequences from the tomato against the entire proteome of the model plant species, Arabidopsis, using the CBSU LOOPP software.