Off Campus Research

If you have not yet read the pages titled “Getting Started” and “Finding Opportunities” please do so before continuing on.

Choosing to do research off campus can be a rewarding experience – you may have a greater degree of flexibility in what you choose to research, you might have access to clinical populations, and you will be exposed to a different academic culture than what we have here at Rice. Approximately half of the BIOS 310 students and most NEUR 310 students perform research off campus in the Texas Medical Center (TMC), reflective of the type and quantity of research opportunities available at each institution.

However, for those considering working off campus: be advised that the decision perform research off-campus should not be made lightly. While undertaking research at another TMC Institution can be a very rewarding experience, there are a number of factors that add to the complexity of off-campus research.

  1. Travel time – You should allow between 30 minutes and an hour for the round trip, which will necessarily reduce the amount of time you have to spend in the lab. MDAnderson’s South Campus and UT School of Dentistry are not walking distance. For the more distant campuses you will likely need to take a shuttle or car unless a safe cycling route can be found.
  2. Hard to drop in for a few minutes – Sometimes when you have a break between classes you will want to drop into lab for a few minutes to start a gel, inoculate a culture, feed cells, or talk to your advisor. These few minutes can often give you a head-start or eliminate waiting time when you have your next block of time in the lab. Due to the distance problem mentioned above, most students in off-campus labs can’t afford the luxury of popping in and out of lab.
  3. Cultural differences between Rice and med-center labs – Many labs at the medical center are not as accustomed to working with undergraduate researchers and may be less accommodating of undergraduate schedules and instructional needs.
  4. Paperwork and safety training courses – Additional paperwork, immunizations, TB tests, and safety training courses are required for most off-campus labs, so you will need to budget extra time to complete these before the start of your research. The paperwork process should be initiated at least 10 weeks before the start of semester to ensure that you are approved to work in the lab by the first week of classes.

Students who have prepared for these complexities can enjoy access to one of the largest medical centers in the world where hundreds of labs produce ground-breaking research on a daily basis.

Finding a lab in the Texas Medical Center

Finding research opportunities in the Texas Medical Center may seem daunting. After all, it is not trivial to sort through the hundreds of laboratories in the TMC member institutions and find one that interests you and has a position available. There are, however, ways to narrow your search. Try going to the websites meant to help graduate students look for research labs.

Two of the largest graduate schools in the Texas Medical Center are the University of Texas Graduate School of Biomedical Science (UTHealth) and the Baylor College of Medicine Graduate School of Biomedical Science (BCM). On these graduate school sites, follow links to “programs” or “Ph.D. programs” to see the various program fields offered (e.g. cancer biology, neuroscience, immunology). Each program will offer a list of participating faculty. Find a program of interest to you, follow the “faculty” link, and click on faculty to see their research summaries. UTHealth provides additional resources in the form of a list of faculty looking for undergraduate interns and the paperwork for the Visiting Scholar Program that every intern must fill out. The latter it is currently gated for UTHealth employees, so you may have to provide the link to your research advisor and have them retrieve the forms. Please note that the list of faculty looking for interns is far from an exhaustive list, and that there are many more faculty that may be interested in having you join their lab if you simply email them.

For a more focused search, we’ve provided some departments and programs below that have historically worked with BIOS and NEUR 310. Click through, and then find the “faculty” or “people” tabs to see the lists of faculty and their research interests.

BIOS 310
NEUR 310

Don’t be limited by the lists above. Many labs outside of these departments offer research that would qualify for BIOS 310 or NEUR 310. Additionally, interesting molecular and cellular biology projects may be found in Neuroscience departments, and vice versa. Likewise, don’t be confused if you see the same faculty member’s name in multiple departments or graduate programs. Many faculty have joint appointments to foster collaboration and accommodate the interdisciplinary nature of their research.

When you have found a faculty member in the medical center willing to host you, you must then complete an application (below) to have the lab and project approved by the Independent Research course instructor.

Please note, not all kinds of research will be approved! For BIOS 310, your research should fall under the umbrella of something that could be considered biological laboratory or bioinformatics research (working with DNA, protein, cells, tissues, model organisms, ecology field studies, or using datasets from lab or field studies to answer biological questions). For NEUR 310, your research should have something that can reasonably be described as neuroscience. This requires either measuring or modeling a physiological system related to the brain or (more generally) mental activity. For example, doing work where you are asking subjects to record their emotional states would, by itself, not count as neuroscience (it would be psychology or cognitive science). However, if your subjects were to have their brain states recorded by an MRI while they were taking the same survey, it would count as neuroscience. This line is occasionally fuzzy – if you have an interest in a particular lab or type of research that is an edge case or outside the guidelines mentioned above, you should discuss this with the appropriate course instructor.

Off-Campus Experiential Education Opportunities

If you have secured an internship opportunity that may not fit into the requirements of BIOS 310 or NEUR 310, you can consider applying instead for BIOS 299: Experiential Education in BioSciences. Most activities relating to biology or science in general will qualify for BIOS 299. Some examples include, a science policy, clinical research, research in a lab or biotech company, environmental analysis for an environmental non-profit. Unlike the research courses, BIOS 299 activities are not restricted to Houston.

 

Good luck with your search!

 

*The BIOS 310 application form is only for off-campus research. Those in Biosciences faculty labs will register directly through your professor’s section. If you wish to perform BIOS 310 research with a Rice faculty member who is not a Biosciences primary or joint faculty member, you will need to find a Biosciences research faculty member willing to sponsor your out-of-department research.