UCF Students

The University of Central Florida (UCF) offers a variety of undergraduate and graduate programs in Biomedical Sciences. These include a BS in Biomedical Sciences , MS in Biomedical Science, and PhD as well as MD-PhD programs. Of particular relevance to the research in my lab is the Infectious Disease Track in the MS in Biomedical Science.

If you are a UCF undergraduate or graduate student in Biomedical Sciences, Computer Science, or Biology, and interested pursuing research experience in the Azarian lab continue reading below before contacting me.

I offer undergraduate research assistant positions, mentoring for Honors in the Major, and graduate research assistant positions for masters and PhD students. Positions are highly competitive, especially for undergraduates in BSBS.

You can browse our publication history to get a flavor for the type of research we conduct in our lab. In general, our research spans work in both the “wet lab” and “dry lab”. Wet lab research is comprised mostly of molecular and genomic biology – culturing bacteria, transformations, competition experiments, performing DNA extractions, and constructing libraries for next-gen sequencing using Illumina and Oxford Nanopore technology. Dry lab research focuses on computational biology, bioinformatics, phylogenetics, bacterial population genomics, and disease modeling. As such, I am particularly looking for students with the following interest and/or expertise:

• Computer programing (i.e., coding in BASH, Python, Perl, R)

• Evolutionary biology, population genetics, of phylogenetics

• Biostatistics and infectious disease modeling

• Public health and epidemiology

• Molecular biology

Regardless of your background, you will be encouraged to cross-train among these disciplines. Wet-lab scientists will learn how to analyze whole-genome sequencing data and computational scientist will learn how to generate sequencing data from a bacterial isolate. Below, I have included a list of courses at UCF that will prepare you for the type of research we conduct. I also suggest reading the blog post “So you want to learn bioinformatics for bacterial population genomics” that I co-authored and reading some of the publications mentioned in that post. Undergraduate students that are interested in pursuing graduate research in the Azarian Lab are encouraged to complete one or more the undergraduate courses. In addition, if you would like to learn some basic coding skills (highly encouraged), Software Carpentry and Codecademy are two popular resources.

If all of this sounds exciting, feel free to contact me with your CV and a research statement stating why you would like to pursue research in the Azarian Lab. Extra points are given for those individuals who take the time to browse our publication history and active projects, then come up with suggestions for study ideas on their own. I do have funding available for pursuit of novel research ideas. Last, if you include Genome Knights in the subject line of your e-mail, I will know that you have taken the time to read through this page. Go Knights!

Courses of Interest: