Biophysical Society member Rejwan Ali shares the work of the St. John's Student Chapter Program during this year's Biophysics Week.
On March 25th, 2019, the newly formed Biophysics Club in St. John’s University, located in Queens, New York, observed National Biophysics Week at their Physics Department. Students with various backgrounds such as physics, mathematics, chemistry, and computer science participated in the events; all with great enthusiasm. The program highlighted presentations by a number of undergraduate senior students on different biophysics topics and included 3D printed demonstrations of the neurotensin receptor models, a G-protein coupled receptor, double-helix DNA models, and more. A majority of the Biophysics Club members are also active in undergraduate biophysics research, and had the opportunity to present their projects during the St. John’s University’s research poster day events. In addition to the events, the physics department of St. John’s University also offers a senior level biological physics course with pedagogical topics in biophysics and current state-of-the-art tools, methods, and techniques in experiment and computational biophysics. The course was able to recruit a select number of students to engage in biophysics research and to pursue opportunities in biophysics, medical physics, and biomedical graduate programs.
The Biophysics Club's student members are to be commended for their hard work in coordinating and conducting their Biophysics Week with limited resources, time,and experience. Physics Chairman Professor Mostafa Sadoqi, who also has a keen interest in biophysics research, has been very supportive of the event and overall to the formation of the Biophysics Club. The student club has already applied, and has been approved, to the Biophysical Society for student chapter recognition.
Going forward, the chapter expects to host more biophysics-related events and networking opportunities so that students interested in these areas of physics can use them for their benefit. Since biophysics is truly a cross-disciplinary platform, the chapter expects more participation of interested students and faculty for future events. In turn, these activities will present long lasting positive impacts for students from all disciplines, and will be able to get connected to national biophysics events and opportunities therein on different sub-fields. Despite the Greater New York City and Tri State regions having many world class compet
itive graduate programs of experimental and computational biophysics in many forms, a very low percentage of students from the area are pursuing these opportunities. Exposing the field of biophysics to high school and community college students is essential, and St. John’s University’s physics program can play a pivotal role in that process primarily because of its geographical location and faculty resources. Physics programs that are composed of research specializations in high energy, nuclear, astronomy and condensed matter often cannot assess the true significance and manifolds the growth of biophysics. Therefore, it is imperative that a physics program is established that can identify biophysics as a prioritized research area, so that it can serve and engage more students in terms of placements and jobs for the foreseeable future.