Belonging is not just a word at QCB
Our center prides itself on being a leader in broadening participation. We strive every day to increase participation [and a sense of belonging] of underrepresented groups in center activities through collaboration, access, and participation of underrepresented groups in center-created resources and programs. We are increasing the number of women who have formal training in quantitative techniques through our courses and workshops.
Villa Cisse Scholars Program
The Villa Cisse Scholars program at the Center for Quantitative Cell Biology is designed to promote Black and Hispanic undergraduate students by offering research opportunities they might not otherwise have.
In this 18-month program, students apply in the spring semester, and, once selected, spend two weeks at Illinois in the summer being introduced to the Center and research techniques and research options. They select a team and, during the academic year, prepare to spend a 10-week summer session immersed with their chosen QCB research team.
The program is named for two well-known biophysicists who earned their doctorates at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Elizabeth Villa, an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and a professor in the Department of Molecular Biology, University of California San Diego, was a graduate student in the Theoretical and Computational Biophysics Group at the Beckman Institute. The TCBG is a QCB collaborator, and the Beckman Institute is QCB’s home base. Ibrahim Cisse, director of the Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics, studied under QCB researcher Taekjip Ha, who is now at Harvard.
Summer School in Quantitative Biology
The Summer School in Quantitative Cell Biology is designed for graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and researchers in physics, biophysics, chemical and life sciences, and engineering who seek to expand their research skills in quantitative methods for
studying and modeling cells. The summer school includes lectures, mini-courses, and hands-on training in experimental and computational techniques.
