The National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis (NIMBioS) has announced that Rachael Ward ’14, a mathematics major at Rhodes, has been selected for its highly competitive Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program currently underway at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK).
The 2013 NIMBioS REU program runs for eight weeks through Aug. 2 and includes 19 undergraduates from universities across the United States. Participants live on campus and work in teams with postdoctoral researchers and UTK faculty on research at the interface of mathematics and biology.
The research projects for the 2013 program are mathematical modeling of fetal electrocardiograms, modeling animal disease from coronavirus, automatic detection of rare birds from audio recording, modeling the environmental transmission of E-coli in cattle, modeling protein translation and genome evolution, and modeling animal social network dynamics. Ward is working on the social network dynamics research team.
NIMBioS is a National Science Foundation-sponsored initiative to foster interdisciplinary research at the interface between mathematical and biological sciences. Additional NIMBioS sponsors include the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Ward, who is from Woodville, Miss., is a graduate of West Feliciana High School in St. Francisville, La.