Friday, August 28, 2015

A Warm Welcome to Our Incoming Students!

The Department of Biological Sciences welcomes all of its new graduate and undergraduate students for the first day of class on August 31st.

This year, 7 Ph.D. students, Stephanie Crilly, Manning Huang, Scott Keith, Amber LePeruta, Teresa Spix, Daniel Wilson, and Iris Yang begin their studies. Our incoming Ph.D. students are joining us after completing degrees at several local universities, including Clarion University and our very own Carnegie Mellon, and major universities across the country, such as the University of California - Berkeley, Stevenson University, and Pennsylvania State University. Over the next few weeks, these students will begin the first of three lab rotations, where they learn more about the department's faculty and research. After completing their lab rotations and core courses, the new students will select a research advisor, marking the beginning of their doctoral research at Carnegie Mellon University.

Additionally, 26 M.S. in Computational Biology students, Raghunandan Avula, Christine Baek, Dan Cao, Qi Chu, Charlotte Darby, Rene Francolini, Chaohao Gu, Priyanka Jayaram Reddy Raja, Hannah Kim, Deepank Korandla, Yanyu Liang, Xin Lu, Yue Lu, Tim Majarian, Mao Mao, Jingzhi Pang, Soyeon Roh, Ge Song, Qingyuan Song, Xupeng Tong, Linhua Wang, Siwei Xie, Chao-Ming Yen, Jilong Yu, Sheng Yuan, and Bernie Zhao are joining the department in the joint program with the Computational Biology Department. They are coming from all over the country and around the globe, having previously attended universities in California, Beijing, Michigan, Hong Kong, Texas, Taipei, and Vermont, among others. Their previous degrees are in physics, computer science, biology, chemistry, mathematics, biochemistry, pharmacy, and other related fields.

Fifty-eight sophomores have also declared a primary major in biological sciences, computational biology, or the unified major of biology and psychology. In addition to the core Biology courses, undergraduate students take a variety of electives in the areas of genetics and molecular biology, biochemistry and biophysics, cell and developmental biology, neuroscience, and computational biology. A vast majority of undergraduates will have the chance to conduct research in faculty labs, participate in activities and events sponsored by the Biological Sciences Student Advisory Council (BioSAC), and involve themselves in community science outreach programs.

Welcome all to the Department of Biological Sciences!

*Pictured above: Incoming Ph.D. and M.S. students