REU Site: Quantitative Rules of Life: General Theories across Biological Systems

This REU Site award to the Santa Fe Institute (SFI), located in Santa Fe, NM, will support the training of 8 students for 10 weeks during the summers of 2024-2026. It is anticipated that a total of 24 students, primarily from schools with limited research opportunities or from an under-represented group, will be trained in the program. Students chosen for this program will have a unique opportunity to participate in frontier research centered on the Quantitative Rules of Life.

The independence and agency afforded by the program will expose student researchers to key questions and emerging research directions, engage them in novel, impactful research, and encourage the pursuit of their scientific ideas. SFI will provide a network of collaboration and support extending beyond the program. An online tool will be used to assess the effectiveness of the program.

The program aims to meet the frontier of biology by developing new cross-cutting theoretical tools that draw on computer science, physics, and mathematics. Defining and understanding the Quantitative Rules of Life requires input from many disciplines, and SFI is an ideal home for such integration as a recognized leader in interdisciplinary research.

Students will have ownership over the direction and approaches of their project and be guided through the research process by one of our expert mentors from among SFI’s faculty. Students will expand their understanding of the emerging and diverse science of universal laws in biology and contribute to meritorious, frontier research. This program will train students to apply common theoretical principles to identify laws that regulate multiple scales of biology, from single cells to organisms and entire ecosystems.

Students will be selected by the mentor pool and the education office at the Santa Fe Institute. This and other student opportunities can be found via the NSF ETAP system. This project is jointly funded by the Division of Biological Infrastructure in the Directorate of Biological Sciences and the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR).

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.