General Information for Interested Undergrads and Masters Students

From GersteinInfo

Undergraduate students come to Gerstein Lab from a mix of backgrounds and interests. The lab is inherently interdisciplinary, using high performance computing and quantitative methods to address biological and biomedical questions. Undergraduate students in Gerstein Lab typically major in one or sometimes two fields related to biology, computer science, or math, and are at least familiar with or curious about aspects of all three fields.

A bit of a multi-step plan:

1 * See examples of past and present undergrads, and what it's like to be in the lab

undergraduate stories

http://www.gersteinlab.org/people/alumni.htm

The above only includes a selection of ~60 undergrads that spent substantial amounts of time in the lab.

http://www.gersteinlab.org/people/

(These have included STARs students and perspective science students.)

Undergrads have done a variety of things in the lab -- e.g. done summer jobs, taken research for credit courses, worked for pay during the academic year. An example of a research course project done by a undergraduate is: http://zoo.cs.yale.edu/classes/cs290/14-15a/gonzalez.ian.isg2

2 * Next, glance at their papers

http://papers.gersteinlab.org/subject/student

(The above is a selection of papers involving undergrads in the lab from the lab publication corpus, http://papers.gersteinlab.org . The convention in the biological sciences is for the lab head to be last author, the first author leads the project, and the middle authors help out.)

Here are some examples (first author papers by lab undergrads who spent quite a bit of time in the lab):

1. http://papers.gersteinlab.org/papers/molmovdb2 (A very physical paper done by a senior undergrad. who worked in the lab in a 5th year.)
2. http://papers.gersteinlab.org/papers/bayesloc-jmb (A fairly genomic paper done by BS/MS MB&B student)
3. http://papers.gersteinlab.org/papers/pubnet (A computational tool done by a CS undergrad. in his last year.)

You may also want to look at the Yale Daily News article mentioning work of one of our undergrads: http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2005/mar/23/students-papers-hit-the-presses/

3 * Drill into some very easy-to-read papers about the lab

http://papers.gersteinlab.org/subject/intro-to-lab/

in particular,

1. simulations: http://papers.gersteinlab.org/papers/watersim-sciam/
2. genomics: http://papers.gersteinlab.org/papers/sciam2
3. proteomics:http://papers.gersteinlab.org/papers/amsci/

4 * You might want to look at our research summary and some press write-ups as well.

See http://www.gersteinlab.org/research and Selected Press Accounts Highlighting Gerstein Lab Work

Flipping through a few lectures is also easy.

5 * The above steps (1 to 4), give you some context. Now if you're interested, you might want to talk to current senior PhD students and postdocs in the lab, who could potentially be mentors for a initial project

http://www.gersteinlab.org/people/

(These can often be listed by their initials -- e.g. JR = Joel Rozowsky .)

You might want to contact these people with a CC back to Mark.

6 * Finally, write back to Mark with some summary thoughts on the above, and then arrange a meeting.

7 * Any arrangement is possible. The only rule is don't be a *FLAKE*.