A week at MIT
The first week of the new year brought smatterings of undergraduates returning to the MIT campus after the holidays — and 54 new faces were among them. These students traveled from across the country to attend the annual Quantitative Methods Workshop, a weeklong event with lectures and classes for undergraduates from partner institutions including Howard University, Hunter College, and the University of Puerto Rico. The workshop, sponsored by the Department of Biology and the National Science Foundation-funded Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines, focused on how computer programming can apply to problems in biology and neuroscience. Amy Keating, co-director of MIT’s graduate program in biology, has taught at the workshop for the past five years. “The workshop gives students with a broad range of backgrounds exposure to the exciting ways in which quantitative tools are applied in modern biological research,” Keating says. “Some math and computer science students don’t realize that they can...