The students presented their research during the SURP Fellows’ Research Day.
Three Rensselaer undergraduate biology students—Mohsin Jawed ’16, Mattie Rosi-Schumacher ’15, and Dongbo “Peter” Yang ’16—spent their summer vacation participating in cutting-edge research as part of the prestigious Summer Undergraduate Research Program (SURP) at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
The partnership between Rensselaer and Mount Sinai creates an alliance that combines Rensselaer’s strength in engineering, data science, high performance computing, and technological entrepreneurship with Mount Sinai’s expertise in biomedical research and clinical care.
Jawed, Rosi-Schumacher, and Yang were among 22 SURP fellows selected in 2014. SURP fellows were matched with a Mount Sinai faculty mentor and were given access to state-of-the-art biomedical research laboratories. Fellows also attended weekly seminars, participated in department and work-in-progress meetings, and presented their research during the SURP Fellows’ Research Day.
The partnership between Rensselaer and Mount Sinai creates an alliance that combines Rensselaer’s strength in engineering, data science, high performance computing, and technological entrepreneurship with Mount Sinai’s expertise in biomedical research and clinical care.”
Yang worked in Dr. James Manfredi’s lab and his mentor was Dr. Lois Resnick-Silverman in the Department of Oncological Sciences. “It was a great experience to do serious cutting-edge cancer research in a world-leading medical institute. The research environment at Mount Sinai is great, and it further strengthened my will to study oncology for the rest of my life,” he said. “I also learned several valuable techniques that will benefit my research project in the Cancer Cell Biology group at RPI.”
Rosi-Schumacher worked in biomedical informatics and was mentored by Brian Kidd, a senior biomedical informatics research scientist in the Dudley Lab.
“The program was really great,” she said. “The Dudley Lab was very welcoming and accommodating, and my mentor was especially helpful. I really learned a lot. I am also very pleased with the project I worked on and the results I was able to find. The experience has sparked my interest in the field of bioinformatics and the way that big data can be used in translational research and medicine.”
Jawed, who is pursuing a joint B.S.-M.D. through the accelerated physician-scientist program, joined a bioengineering lab at Mount Sinai and worked on cardiac tissue engineering.
