Research Internship ('Forschungspraktikum') Computational Life Sciences

We offer both pre-defined topics and topics suggested by students and approved by us for the research internship Computational Life Sciences. If you are interested in some of our research or want to suggest a topic, please get in touch. We will also try to find a topic tailored to you that fits your and our interests, following the procedure outlined below. Keep in mind, that if you want to propose your own topic, you should have an idea of what research question you want to answer. In this case, you should write down your topic in a 1-pager.

There are no formal requirements, but you will need to:

1. write code for computational experiments in python,
2. perform some data analysis / visualization,
3. work with graphs / networks and basic network analysis methods.

A gap in some of these skills can be bridged, but if haven’t gathared experience in any of these yet, the research internship is not a good fit at this time. You can learn all of these skills in our Practical Course on Biological Networks, which we recommend.

Regardless of whether you are contacting us for a pre-defined topic or have your own topic in mind, please include a recent Transcript of Records and quickly list your experience with computational methods / programming, data science, and data visualization. Also add the following information:

• What timeframe are we talking about? Ideal end date?
• Where do you see your strengths/weaknesses? What relevant courses did you attend?

The research internship begins with a research question agreed upon before the start of the internship. This research question is related to ongoing work at our chair and investigates a biological system or relationship using methods from network science.

During the internship, you will

1. familiarize yourself with the literature on that question, both on the biological and on the methodological side,
2. design a computational experiment to answer or advance the research question,
3. implement and execute the computational experiment,
4. visualize (where applicable) and interpret the resulting data, and
5. write a research report and present it in a talk at our chair.

These general steps are true for any project in our research internship, but specific projects may include additional analysis steps and differ in the details depending on their requirements.

During the project, you are invited to come and work in our students’ room at the institute. You will be supervised by a member of the chair, and be taught relevant knowledge about methods, the research process, writing, and presenting.