MURI Research Program
What is MURI?
MURI is a summer long or semester long research program where undergraduate students are placed in a research lab on campus. Here, they will work on a team of peers and professors to contribute research to an overall group project. At the end of the program, the team presents a poster of their findings throughout the program.
Why is MURI Beneficial?
This engaged learning experience will help me both as a student and as a professional by allowing me to work in a functioning lab and perform my own research on a project with other students and professors. By doing this, I am able to understand the collaboration it takes to be successful on a team of researchers, how to professionally communicate, and I will be able to pick up some valuable laboratory skills as well.
I think that this experience would touch on all of the Profiles of Learning for Undergraduate Success as I will be able to communicate within the project team, contribute to the research community at IUPUI, and solve difficult problems that arise in experiments.
How can I Make it Happen?
To make this a reality, I will research the MURI requirements and begin to ask professors and advisors about research opportunities on campus to gain insight into which lab I would like to work in, as well as which types of projects interest me. In the Spring semester of my Freshman year, I will apply to the program and hopefully join a research team for the summer.
This is a photo of the graduate students and I in the lab I worked in during the MURI program. All of the grad students were so helpful during the process and I learned so much from them; from learning how to begin one of the assays to its data analysis, they taught me a lot. I owe part of my great experience in MURI to these incredible graduate students!
This photo is of me demonstrating my pipette skills, a lab skill that I already felt comfortable navigating upon entering into the REU program.
Micropipetting was a crucial skill for me to have as my every-day experiments required mastery of it in order to successfully complete the assays I was performing.
In this photo, I am using a micropipette to prepare the reaction samples I was using for a protein denaturing assay to examine the effects the CST protein complex has on the protein APE1.