BSCD Summer Research Fellowship in Application of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence in Biological and Health Sciences - 2025

Summer Research Fellowship in Application of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence in Biological and Health Sciences

The Fellowship awards a $5500 stipend for the summer research period.

The emergence of Machine Learning (ML), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and recently large language models (e.g.: generative AI) in healthcare has been groundbreaking, reshaping the way we diagnose, treat, and monitor patients. AI is drastically improving healthcare research and outcomes by producing more accurate diagnoses and enabling more personalized treatments. The primary objective of this program is to educate a cohort of undergraduate students in the Biological and Physical Science Divisions (BSD & PSD), offering them both training and an immersive and interdisciplinary research experience in AI and ML with a specific application in biological and health sciences. This fellowship is in collaboration with the Biological Sciences Collegiate Division, Research Computing Center (RCC) and Department of Computer Science.

Program Details

The program will include an initial comprehensive training in AI and ML methods through hands-on workshops led by the RCC. Each day will have lectures in the morning and hands-on practice in the afternoon or demos. Students will have access to RCC computational resources for training. The undergraduate students will also use these two weeks to work with their designated faculty mentor to get introduced to the project they will be working on and refine the specific tasks they will work on when they join the research group.

The training session will have lectures in the morning and hands on workshops in the afternoon. Some of the topics that will be covered are

• Introduction to high performance computation and Unix commands
• Basics of AI and Neural Networks (how neural networks can be applied to model and analyze complex biological systems)
• Introduction to computational biology (basics and the role of AI in understanding biological systems). Introduction to AlphaFold in predicting protein structure.
• Fundamentals of Deep Learning
• Tools and datasets (popular tools and datasets for analyzing biological data)
• Data visualization (using AI tools to visualize complex biological data)
• Introduction to Language models
• Medical imaging (AI applications such as image segmentation and disease classification)

After the initial training session, each student will be assigned to a research project affiliated with a UChicago PI group. The students will actively contribute to their respective research projects, leveraging the computational and consultation resources available at the RCC as needed.

During the research phase of the fellowship, we will hold weekly meetings where all students come together to share their experiences. We will also schedule time to invite industry professionals to speak with the students about applications and advancements in AI and ML.

Upon completion of the program and during week ten, students will showcase their research outcomes through an oral presentation. The students will also be invited to present a poster at the RCC flagship symposium -Mind Bytes sharing their findings with the wider University community. The oral presentation and symposium will provide the students with a good opportunity to practice their presentation and scientific poster preparation skills and receive feedback from both experts and peers.

Eligibility and Qualifications

University of Chicago undergraduate students who have completed at least one year in the College (1st through 3rd years). Some coding background is needed– selected students will be provided with a comprehensive training in AI and ML methods at the beginning of the fellowship program. 

Students will be matched with a UChicago faculty research group. Students working on related projects with UChicago faculty members can also submit materials to participate in this fellowship with an already identified research mentor.

Some of the PIs participated in the fellowship program in summer 2024 and the projects the students worked on are listed below:

Seppe Kuehn (Department of Ecology and Evolution); Project: Learning Structure of Environmental Change across Global Soil Microbiome Samples

Huisingh-Scheetz (Department of Medicine-Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine); Project: Forecasting Frailty: Using Accelerometers to Predict Health Outcomes in Aging Adults

Henry Hoffmann (Department of Computer Science); Project: Hypernetwork for self-calibrating brain computer interface

Xinan Holly Yang (Department of Pediatrics); Project: Machine learning in cellular developmental biology

Callum Ross (Department of organismal biology and anatomy); Project: DeepLabCut & XMALab Pipeline to Enhance Pose Estimation Workflows

Required Materials

• Resume
• Cover letter – please submit one or two paragraphs to describe your interest in this fellowship program.

Please Note: If you are applying to multiple BSCD Fellowship Grants, please fill out the following BSCD Preference Form - https://careeradvancement.wufoo.com/forms/bscd-research-2025/