Sprout helps bring scientific research and entrepreneurial ambitions to life by providing seed funding. As an added bonus, recipients will also have the option to choose to participate in our spring cohort of the NSF I-Corps fellowship, which provides training in technology commercialization and a stipend up to $750 for related expenses.
Interested applicants can complete this pre-application form, due on February 19th.
The Division of Science is pleased once again to announce the availability of Traineeships for Undergraduates in Computational Neuroscience through a grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse.Traineeships will commence in summer 2021 and run through the academic year 2021-22.
From former trainee Dahlia Kushinksy’s first-author paper published in Journal of Experimental Biology, “In vivo effects of temperature on the heart and pyloric rhythms in the crab, Cancer borealis”
Traineeships in Computational Neuroscience are intended to provide intensive undergraduate training in computational neuroscience for students interested in eventually pursuing graduate research. The traineeships will provide approximately $5000 in stipend to support research in the summer, and $3000 each for fall and spring semesters during the academic year. Current Brandeis sophomores and juniors (classes of ’22, ’23) may apply. To be eligible to compete for this program, you must
have a GPA > 3.0 in Div. of Science courses
have a commitment from a professor to advise you on a research project related to computational neuroscience
have a course work plan to complete requirements for a major in the Division of Science
intend to apply to grad school in a related field.
Interested students should apply online (Brandeis login required). Questions may be addressed to Steven Karel <divsci at brandeis.edu> or to Prof. Paul Miller.
In spite of all the uncertainty about the summer to come, it is time for Brandeis Science undergraduates doing research to think about applying for summer fellowships. The Division of Science, through a variety of sources, will likely have enough money to support roughly the same number of students as in recent years. For the most part, funding comes in the form of $5000 stipends that are paid directly to students to support them while working in labs in the summer.
There are also full-year Computational Neuroscience traineeships to support students. We will be looking for 6 students to appoint for 2021-22.
To apply, students will need to have a commitment from a faculty mentor to supervise their research in Summer 2021. Applications will be due on March 2, 2021. Students will need a single letter of reference from their faculty mentor.
The SciComm Lab is hosting a workshop for Brandeis undergraduates who are interested in learning about application strategies for summer science research opportunities at Brandeis University.
The Division of Science announces the opening of the Division of Science Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship competition for Brandeis students who will be doing undergraduate research in Summer 2019. These fellowships are funded by generous alumni donations and by grants. Winners will get $5000 stipends for the summer.
Some funding programs have changed since last year; please see the Div Sci website for details of the programs which fund students across all the sciences. We expect to fund about 30 students this summer.
The due date for applications is February 27, 2019 at 6:00 PM EST.
Students who will be rising Brandeis sophomores, juniors, or seniors in Summer 2019 (classes of ’20, ’21 and ’22), who in addition are working in a lab in the Division of Science at the time of application, are eligible to apply. A commitment from a Brandeis faculty member to serve as your mentor in Summer 2019 is required.
The Division of Science Summer Program will run from June 3 – Aug 9, 2019. Recipients are expected to be available to do full time laboratory research during that period, and must commit to presenting a poster at the final poster session (SciFest IX) on Aug 8, 2019.
Interested students should apply online (Brandeis login required). Questions that are not answered in the online FAQs may be addressed to Steven Karel <divsci at brandeis.edu>.
Brandeis is one of 57 schools to receive a $1 million 5-year grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s (HHMI’s) Inclusive Excellence Initiative, the aim of which is “to create a community of scientists and science educators engaged in 57 experiments, each experiment aimed at understanding how institutional change with respect to inclusion can be achieved.” Under the direction of Henry F. Fischbach Professor of Chemistry and HHMI Professor Irving Epstein, Professor of Biology Melissa Kosinski-Collins and Associate Provost Kim Godsoe, the program has four major thrusts: a) Galaxy, a cohort based program, modeled on Brandeis’s highly successful Science Posse, to provide peer and near-peer support and mentorship for prospective science majors; b) workshops, incorporated into introductory laboratory courses, that address issues such as imposter syndrome, implicit bias and stereotype threat and encourage students to reflect upon the learning environment that they wish to create for themselves and their classmates; c) low-enrollment practicum courses designed to strengthen students’ quantitative skills through project-based research studies; and d) a faculty learning community that will bring together instructors in key courses to grapple with issues that may hamper student performance and retention. The discussions in b) and d) will be informed by written and oral presentations from students and alumni, who will be asked to reflect on how their preparation and their reception by faculty and other students affected their experience in STEM. These initiatives will help Brandeis change the culture and climate of how the community perceives all students studying STEM.
A major impetus for this undertaking is the recognition that students in the sciences begin with a wide range of preparation and experience, and that currently retention in science majors is heavily correlated with level of preparation and initial success in introductory courses. Nationally, only 48% if students entering college with the intention of majoring in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) actually complete a STEM major. At Brandeis the record is somewhat better, but there is still much room for improvement. The programs in this initiative are designed to overcome the “sink or swim” mentality that affects many students (and faculty) by making them aware that, with appropriate support and perseverance, all students can succeed in the sciences no matter where they start from, even if the road is rocky at the start.
Shenzhen-based Huawei Technologies, the largest manufacturer of telecom equipment in the world, is supporting Associate Professor of Computer Science Olga Papaemmanouil‘s efforts to develop machine learning approaches for managing the performance of data management systems. The grant will support research on workload management, that is the task of query placement, query scheduling and resource allocation for database applications. Workload management is an extremely critical task for database systems as it can impact the execution time of incoming processing tasks as well as the overall perceived performance of the database and the quality of the service (QoS) offered to end-clients. The complexity of the problem increases for applications that involve dynamically changing workloads and concurrently executing queries sharing the same underlying resources, as well as applications that are deployed on data clusters with fluctuating resource availability.
Dr. Papaemmanouil’s research aims to design frameworks that can be trained on application-specific properties and performance metrics to automatically learn how to effectively dispatch incoming queries across a cluster of servers, implicitly solving the resource allocation challenge. These techniques will rely on machine learning algorithms (reinforcement learning and deep learning) that model the interaction of concurrently running queries as well as the relationship between database performance and the underlying resource availability in the cluster. The project will lead the way towards the development of workload management solutions that eliminate ad-hoc heuristics often used by database administrators to address these challenges and replace them with software modules capable of providing custom workload management strategies to end-clients.
The SPROUT Awards are back! If you are interested in the SPROUT program, which offers funding for bench research, the Office of Technology Licensing is hosting Information Sessions for you to learn more on how to apply. Get your questions answered by the program’s administrators. There will be two separate sessions for your convenience: January 24th, 3-4 PM at Carl J. Shapiro Science Center Library and February 1st, 3-4 PM in Volen 201. Light refreshments will be served.
New this year, SPROUT winners may also be eligible for up to an additional $3,000 of I-Corps funding from the National Science Foundation. This extra funding is specifically earmarked for teams to conduct early customer discovery and validation of their technology. Those that go through the Brandeis I-Corps program then become eligible to apply to the National I-Corps program which provides grants up to $50,000.
In the past, successful SPROUT applications have come from all departments in the sciences including Biology, Biochemistry, Physics, and Chemistry. Past candidates have proposed projects ranging from early-stage research and development to patent-ready projects. Many undergraduates, graduates, staff and faculty have all pitched various projects from a New Strategy to Treat Chronic Infections (Hedstrom Lab) to Development of a New Crystal Screening Chip (Fraden Lab) to a panel of outside judges in the hopes of receiving funding. Read more about SPROUT and learn about past projects.
Brandeis University has received a major grant to expand the LAPPS Grid Project that seamlessly connects open-source computer programs to quickly analyze huge amounts of language from diverse sources and genres.
James Pustejovsky
Brandeis University has been awarded a two-year, $390,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to lead an international collaboration to link the two major American and European infrastructures for the computational analysis of natural language. The resulting meta-framework has the potential to transform scholarship and development across multiple disciplines in the sciences, language and social sciences, and digital humanities by enabling scholars in Europe, the US, and Asia to work seamlessly across a massive range of software tools and data resources, developed separately by the American and European efforts. Led by James Pustejovsky, the TJX/ Feldberg Professor of Computer Science at Brandeis, the project team includes Nancy Ide (Vassar College), Erhard Hinrichs (University of Tübingen), and Jan Hajic (Charles University Prague).
The Language Applications (LAPPS) Grid Project—a collaborative, NSF-funded effort among Vassar, Brandeis, Carnegie Mellon University, and the Linguistic Data Consortium at the University of Pennsylvania—and the European Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure (CLARIN) are both frameworks (“grids”) that create and provide access to a broad range of computational resources for analyzing vast bodies of natural language data: digital language data collections, digital tools to work with them, and expertise for researchers to use them. Within each framework, members adhere to common standards and protocols, so that tools and data from different projects are “interoperable”: users can access, combine, and chain data from different repositories and tools from different sources to perform complex operations on a single platform with a single sign-on.
But the LAPPS Grid and CLARIN are not themselves interoperable. Researchers using data and tools in one framework cannot easily access or add data and tools from the other. LAPPS Grid users cannot access CLARIN’s multi-lingual services for digital humanities, social sciences, and language technology research and development, like Prague’s tools for search of oral history archives (developed to support their hosting the USC Shoah Archive), or Tübingen’s WebLicht services for data mining political and social science documents. CLARIN users don’t have access to the LAPPS Grid’s state-of-the-art tools for English and, through the LAPPS Grid’s federation with five Asian grids, to services providing a broad spectrum of capabilities for work in Asian languages. Scholars manually annotating a text corpus with CLARIN’s WebAnno (developed at TU-Darmstadt) would love to feed their work through iterative machine learning and evaluation facilities in the LAPPS Grid—but can’t.
The new Mellon Foundation funding will enable the project team to make the two grids interoperable on three levels:
Infrastructural: While the LAPPS Grid and CLARIN are both committed to open data and software, they do provide secure access to licensed resources, including the vast majority of the language data available over the web. The team will create a “trust network” between the two services, enabling single-authentication sign-on;
Technical: The LAPPS Grid and CLARIN have different underlying architectures and data exchange formats. The team will map these architectures and formats onto one another, enabling communication between the two frameworks over the web;
Semantic: To combine differently curated datasets, the data needs not only to share or be converted into a common format, but must also share a vocabulary for describing basic linguistic structures (a common language ontology) that tells computers how to combine the data into meaningful statements. The project team will extend the common exchange vocabulary developed by the LAPPS Grid to the web services of both frameworks and implement a set of conversion services.
The project will dramatically extend the power and reach of both the European and American frameworks and put their combined resources at the direct disposal of scholars from a broad range of fields in the humanities and social sciences, without requiring them to be computer programmers. “It will effectively create an ‘internet of language applications’ for the everyday computer user,” explained Dr. Pustejovsky. “We’re going to give every scholar access to a toolkit that’s now only available to the largest corporations.”
The recipients of the 6th annual Sprout Awards have been announced. There will be eight teams from labs in the Biology, Biochemistry, and Chemistry departments sharing the $100,000 in funding in FY 2017. The Sprout program’s grant pool was doubled this year in order to expand the support for the promising innovation and research that is happening here at Brandeis University. The Sprout program, created 6 years with the intent to encourage entrepreneurial activity, is sponsored by the Office of the Provost and the Hassenfeld Family Innovation Center. It is administered by the university’s Office of Technology Licensing
Program Will Bestow Up to $100,000 to Promising Research Proposals
Could your research impact the world or do you have an idea that could create positive change? Need funding? SPROUT can help with that.
The popular SPROUT program, now in its sixth year, has announced increased funding for the 2016 round of proposals. SPROUT is funded by the Office of the Provost and run by Office of Technology Licensing. This year the Hassenfeld Family Innovation Center, recently created to support entrepreneurial and innovative collaborations happening across campus, contributed an additional $50,000 to be disbursed among the most promising requests.
Historically, the program has supported a diverse scope of lab-based innovations from all departments in the sciences including Biology, Biochemistry, Physics, and Chemistry. Past candidates have proposed projects ranging from early‐stage research and development to patent‐ready projects ranging from treatments for diseases to lab tools. Brandeis lab scientists have pitched their projects, including HIV vaccines (Sebastian Temme, Krauss lab), neuroslicers (Yasmin Escobedo Lozoya, Nelson lab) and the use of carrot fiber as an anti-diabetic (Michelle Landstrom, Hayes lab) to a panel of distinguished, outside judges. A SPROUT award can jumpstart your innovation and lead to continued opportunities. SPROUT awardees researching the use of carrot fiber as an anti-diabetic food agent were just awarded additional funding by the Massachusetts Innovation Commercialization Seed Fund program.
Other successful projects include “Enzymatic Reaction Recruits Chiral Nanoparticles to Inhibit Cancer Cells” led by Xuewen Du from the Xu lab, “Semaphorin4D: a disease‐modifying therapy for epilepsy” led by Daniel Acker of the Paradis lab, “X‐ray transparent Microfluidics for Protein Crystallization” led by Achini Opathalage from the Fraden lab and “New and Rational Catalyst Development for Green Chemistry” from the Thomas lab. Those interested in learning more about past SPROUT winners are invited to read this recent Brandeis NOW article. A list of additional winners, along with their executive summaries, is available on the Brandeis OTL website.
Teams seeking support for scientific projects which require bench research, lab space, and/or lab equipment are encouraged to submit an abstract prior to the March 7 deadline. The competition is open to the entire Brandeis community including faculty, staff, and students. The Office of Technology Licensing will conduct information sessions on Thursday, February 25th 11:30 a.m.‐12:30 p.m. in Volen 201 and on Monday, February 29th 1:00 p.m.‐2:00 p.m. at the Shapiro Science Center, 1st Floor Library. Staff will address the application process as well as specific questions and interested applicants are highly encouraged to attend.
More details regarding the SPROUT awards, process and online application may be found at bit.ly/SPROUT16.
Brandeis Innovation is pleased to announce the kickoff of its annual Sprout program that supports bench research with grants up to $25,000, funded by the Office of the Provost and Office of Technology Licensing. Teams and individuals working on innovative projects and research within the Division of Science are eligible to apply.
Brandeis is one of 57 schools to receive a $1 million 5-year grant from the 
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Program Will Bestow Up to $100,000 to Promising Research Proposals
Science at Brandeis 