UPMC Hillman Cancer Center Academy
The UPMC Hillman Cancer Center Academy is an 8-week program designed to prepare high school scholars to further their studies in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) and pursue careers in scientific research and medicine. The Academy comprises 9 Sites which focus on various types of cancers as well as different approaches to studying cancer and related diseases. Students are paired with a research mentor and spend the majority of their time (80%) working first-hand on a research project, which is specifically tailored to the student. All students present their work as a research talk at the end of the program and have opportunities to develop posters for subsequent presentations at science fairs and other events. To complement the research training, the Academy also provides didactic sessions, research and career seminars, and professional development opportunities to help students excel in their future pursuits in college as well as careers in science and healthcare.
The CompBio Academy
Introduces students to the emerging fields of research that use both Computational and Experimental approaches to answer fundamental questions in Cancer Biology and related disciplines, including:
- Computational Structural Biology (studying how proteins move and interact with each other)
- Drug Discovery (theoretical and experimental designing and testing of candidate drug compounds)
- Genomics/Bioinformatics (analyzing large data sets of sequencing and other data)
- Image Analysis/Informatics (training a computer how to “see” and analyze biological image data)
- Systems Biology (tackling biological questions using an integrated, holistic approach)