The group has always almost a host of nice stage projecten available. Some of these will be listed here, but be aware that keeping this page up-to-date is tedious work, so that it is likely that at any moment in time we have many more stage projects available than are listed here.
For the foreigners, the question might be "What is a stage"? A stage is a training period for master-students. For Dutch master students in the sciences one or more stages ranging in length from a few months to a full year is obligatory in the master period of their studies.
In general, stage students do not get paid. But we make exceptions for foreign students who get a reimbursement equivalent to one round trip home, and a small monthly fee. See the information for foreign students from the CMBI home page for more details. This is not a CMBI rule, but only holds for my group.
The duration and contents of a stage is determined by your home-institute. The CMBI accepts students for stages of 3 months and longer. Shorter stages are rather useles because most time would be spend on getting started and no time would be left for actually doing some work. Further conditions like adding a theoretical component or a literature study (scriptie) can be set by the home institute.
The conditions for acceptance are simple. If your institute thinks that you can do a stage at the CMBI, and you can find a staff member or PhD student willing to be your supervisor, you can do your stage here. The Vriend group only accepts students who can already write computer programs, or come for a long enough stage to learn programming and still do some useful work afterwards.
This page lists some stage projects. See also the general CMBI stage project page at: CMBI-Student-Stages .
I want to know why a dog can smell so much better than homo sapiens. Is this because dogs have better olfactory receptors, because they have more different ones that are better specialized, or because they have a larger number of square inches in the nose packed with receptors? To find out I want a student to extract all olfactory receptors from the genomes of man and dog, and compare them.
Very often weblab scientists make a mutation and draw conclusions from it. When the structure of the protein they mutated is not available (or they don't have a bioinformatician available to help them look at the structure), these conclusions often are wrong. I am looking dfor a student who wants to learn how to look at protein structures and is not afraid to read many articles to find mutations and look-up what was concluded about them.
In the even years there is each time a world-wide bioinformatics competition called CASP (Google it to learn more). This competition runs in the summer. So we need students from spring (to learn about modelling) over summer (to help us win the competition) till autumn (to write the report).
Etcetera There are many, many more projects. Programming projects, database projects, modelling projects, hospital related projects, and we can help you find a project abroad (Robbie went to Melbourne, Lisa will go to Peking, to just name a few). Just come and ask me.