Purdue NSF Quantitative Physiology Scholars

Welcome Quantitative Physiology Scholars

This wiki is for you to communicate as a community. The QP scholar community consists of undergraduate scholars, graduate mentors, and faculty mentors that are all working and training in interdisciplinary project and mentoring teams.

Thank you NSF

This work is funded by the National Science Foundation S-STEM program. If you are an NSF QP scholar, please do acknowledge this source of funding in your presentations and scholarly works.

Not yet a QP scholar but want to be?? See our website at QP Scholars for application details. We are accepting applications annually.

Mentoring Teams

We will work on creating the mentoring teams during the first week of classes.

Links to Purdue Opportunities

1. SURF Summer undergraduate research fellowships for research under the guidance of engineering faculty (including some of the QP faculty mentors).
2. Purdue Research Park Internship Postings

Links to External Opportunities

1. Computational and Systems Biology Summer Institute. Computational and Systems Biology Summer Institute (CSBSI) at Iowa State University is jointly supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF). The purpose of this program is to provide undergraduate and graduate students majoring in sciences and engineering with an introduction to integrated biology and Systems Biology.

Graduate Fellowships

1. Hertz Graduate Fellowships. "The Hertz Foundation identifies the rare young scientists and engineers with the potential to change the world for the better and supports their research endeavors from an early stage"

Links to Career/Jobs Resources & Tools

1. Institute of Biological Engineering Career Center

What We Do

As Quantitative Physiology Scholars at Purdue University, we strive to bring together the theoretical and empirical sides of physiology.

What do we mean by that?

Following the footsteps of the first quantitative physiologists, A. L. Hodgkin and A. F. Huxley, we are learning to prove points in a way that is complete: looking at a problem (and our solution) not only with laboratory data, but marrying it with principles that can be mathematically found while sitting at a desk. Bridging these two together, we can complete our research, ensuring its reliability. Doing so will make our findings more understandable in that the scientist reading our work or the student whom we are trying to teach can grasp it where they are able – at their strengths, whether mathematics, visual graphs, or written findings from the lab – and therefore, gain so much more.

In this program we are trying to gain knowledge in quantitative physiology through classroom discussions, lab visitations, research, and outreach projects of our own. Through these different pathways, we will put into practice our method of “theoretical and empirical” and try to enrich the world doing so.

Edited by *Danielle R. Kalajian 17:38, 15 October 2008 (EDT):

Current Projects

In this section, we encourage each team to discuss the projects they are currently working on.

1) Graduate Students: Craig Barcus & David Jaroch, Undergraduate Students: Kristy Bielak & Danielle Kalajian

• Physiological Concept we wish to convey.

For this project, we would like to present how hormones can affect what people/animals do and how they act. By this, we would show how humans/animals are born with genetic tendencies and instincts that naturally lead us to act certain ways.

• The best way to present this concept/make it happen.

We are going to let the students put ants and a specific ant hormone together and see how it affects the ant. We would talk about hormones and natural responses, such as ‘fight or flight’, and let the students conduct a hands-on demonstration as to how animals respond to these hormones and their natural instinct concerning them.

• What we would need to make the presentation.

In order to do this presentation, we will assume that the class is made out of 20-30 students. There will need to be one set of supplies for each group of students. The number of students per group will depend on how old (read: mature) the class is, and the younger they are, the more students per group, so that there can always be someone supervising, and less people per group if the students are older.

Each set of supplies will include: • Petri dish • A few ants • Ant pheromones • Cotton swabs (such as q-tips)

The presentation would go something like this: First, we would explain how hormones work, and also cover some natural instincts that are found in humans. Then we would briefly give them an idea of what they might discover as they perform the experiment. The students would then be broken into groups and given the supplies. They would be given an opportunity to draw paths of hormones with the cotton swab and the pheromones. We would give them a few pointers as to what to try, and then let them do things on their own, such as make their own hormone paths. After the experiment was conducted, we would hold a wrap-up session, where we would ask the students what they discovered with their experiment, ask them why they thought it happened, and lastly, how it applies to all living things, especially humans.

Edited by *Danielle R. Kalajian 17:38, 15 October 2008 (EDT):