We said goodbye today to our RISE student, Garrett Early, who joined our group at the end of May to work with me on the project on ultrasensitive signalling pathways. Garrett is a physics student at North Carolina State University (USA) and was awarded with DAAD RISE scholarship that allowed him to travel to Europe and work with us for 10 weeks. RISE is a summer internship program for undergraduate students from the United States, Canada and the UK in the fields of biology, chemistry, physics, earth sciences and engineering that offers unique opportunities for Bachelor students to work with research groups at universities and top research institutions across Germany for a period of 2 to 3 months during the summer.
During his project he was working on developing mathematical "toy model" to understand the robust maintenance of a cellular state of a photosynthetic cell which reacts in an ultrasensitive way to external stimuli. He got aquanted with differential equations based theoretical approach in modelling complex biological systems on the example of photosynthesis. He learned about and tested several kinetic mechanisms to model the balance of small system and trained his programming skills in Python performing small set of simulations. He gave one oral presentation summarising his first month of work and wrote a short report at the end of his internship.
We wish Garrett all the best in his future career and hope he will continue his interest in biology.
From the left: Oliver Ebenhöh (head of the Institute),
Anna Matuszyńska (RISE supervisor) and Garrett Early (RISE student).