Many undergraduates underestimate the importance of research experience. If you are interested in a career in science, early research experience is instrumental in helping you reach your goals for graduate school or employment. Graduate schools and employers will look closely at your research experience and letters of recommendation, which can make or break your application. If you’re interested in a real-life project and are dedicated to putting in the effort to complete a meaningful body of research, resulting in presentations and publications, then my group may be a fit for you. If your goal is to just check a box or for a line item on your resume, please look elsewhere.

Prerequisites

I am looking for dedicated undergraduates with interest and experience in both biology and computer science. Our research questions are biological, but our solutions are computational, so your skill with and interest in computer science or data science will be key for you to succeed in my group. I expect new undergraduate lab members to have taken at least 1 computer science course and 1 biology course, but the more experience and coursework you have completed in computer science, the better. Completing a useful research output will usually require multiple years, so you should be open to a long-term project that will build as you approach graduation. The most important requirement is for you to be intellectually invested in your research experience: you view it as a core part of your education, not as a line item on your CV. I expect a commitment of at least 10 hours per week during the semester.

My mentoring approach

I am committed to providing a valuable undergraduate research experience. My goal will be to develop with you a research project that fits your interests and gives you a meaningful, complete experience. I want your research to both support and complement your traditional coursework – not to be an afterthought. I want you to feel like you belong to a group that will support and help you as you face challenges in your project. I want you to finish your undergraduate experience with a research result you can showcase. I will also provide and encourage opportunities for you to continue your research during the summer.

About the lab

The Databio group (http://www.databio.org) is an interdisciplinary and collaborative computational biology research group located in the Center for Public Health Genomics at UVA. We are also affiliated with the Department of Biomedical Engineering, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics, Department of Public Health Sciences, the School of Data Science, the Cancer Center, and the Child Health Research Center at UVA.

Our research is at the interface of computation and biology, drawing on techniques in computer science, data science, bioinformatics, and machine learning, and applying them to biological questions in cancer, epigenetics, single-cell analysis, development, and genomics. We collect both novel data and public data and make use of UVA’s high-performance cluster for computational approaches to biological questions.

Our biological questions are focused on understanding gene regulation and epigenetics in development and disease, such as cancer, atherosclerosis, and kidney disease. How does DNA encode regulatory networks that enable cellular differentiation? We rely on experimental data from sequencing-based epigenome experiments like ATAC-seq, bisulfite-seq, and ChIP-seq, and we use these data to study fundamental principles of regulatory DNA in human health.

We are building a team of intelligent, creative people who are interested in working together to accomplish great things. We collaborate extensively. We emphasize social coding, using GitHub to share code both within the group and so others can benefit from our work. We seek to write readable, reusable code and apply it to new biological questions. We challenge the norm in academic computational research of individual scientists writing isolated code, and instead push open, multi-author code development. If these topics excite you, please read more about our research interests, recent publications, and philosophy of open data.

Next steps

Before going further, make sure you have:

• Interest and experience in both biology and a quantitative discipline (e.g. computer science, data science, statistics)
• Completed or be taking at least 1 CS and 1 Biology class
• Willingness to commit at least 10 hours per week to your research project
• Intention to work on this project for at least 2 years

If you are interested in these research topics and willing to invest substantial effort, then I’d be delighted to hear from you. Drop a note at . In your letter, please include brief answers to the following questions:

• what are your year, major, and current career goals?
• what is your previous experience with computer science or programming?
• exactly how much time will you commit to research during the school year and summer?
• what are your research interests, and what part of the research in our group excites you most?