Research Opportunities for Undergraduate Students

Evolutionary trees, or phylogenies, are an essential tool in biology, used in all kinds of processes such as understanding evolution, designing new drugs, predicting gene expression, and determining the origin of a virus strain. Often, for one reason or another, scientists get a large set of possible phylogenies, and they would like to understand the structure of the set and the relationships between the various possible evolutionary trees. Our goal for this project is to understand the underlying mathematical structure of treespace to improve the computational searches for the optimal tree.

Software package currently under development for displaying sets of phylogenetic trees in the Mesquite framework.

We are looking for several undergraduate students to join this project. The requirements are:

• enrolled as a full-time student at CUNY,
• have at least a 3.25 GPA,
• completed at least two semesters of mathematics courses beyond Calculus I;
  or two semesters of computer science courses beyond Programming Methods I.
• have excellent communication skills, and
• works well with others.

• completed a discrete mathematics course,
• taken college-level biology, in particular, a course in evolution or systematics, and
• have three or more semesters until graduation.

The project includes:

• mathematical analysis of discrete structures,
• implementation of features and tools to a large java tool designed and maintained by our group, and
• team research projects with the goal of publishing the results,

For students who are US Citizens or permanent residents, funding is available via a grant from the National Science Foundation.

If you are interested, please send a resume, unofficial transcripts, and the names of two faculty members from whom you have taken courses to stjohn@lehman.cuny.edu.