Affiliated Centers and Programs

Interdisciplinary Biological Sciences (IBiS) Ph.D. Program

A unique Ph.D. program that brings together 60 faculty and their students from five departments to tackle cutting edge problems with interdisciplinary approaches.  

QSB students benefit from close association with the IBiS program because they can take classes and conduct research with IBiS students; partner with an IBiS mentor to help navigate classes and getting established at Northwestern;and join the IBiS program after completing QSB Masters degree program. 

 

Masters of Science in Biotechnology Program

The Biotechnology program is a 15-21 month master's program offered by Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering that broadly prepares students for the biotechnology industry and associated professions with training in current industry practices.  QSB students can benefit from this program because of its comfortable class sizes (average of 38-42 students per class). 

Likewise, a few of the top courses of this program include Bioprocess Engineering I & II; Bioprocess Engineering Lab; Technology Commercialization Fundamentals; and Regulatory Sciences in Biotechnology.

National Institute for Theory and Mathematics in Biology

The mission of the NITMB is to create a nationwide collaborative research community that will generate new mathematical results and uncover the “rules of life” through theories, data-informed mathematical models, and computational and statistical tools. The NITMB leverages close collaborations between experimentalists and theorists to synergize discovery. The fundamental research done by NITMB will stimulate advances in areas as diverse as the environment, medicine, and technology development. NITMB members and visitors share space in downtown Chicago that is readily accessible to collaborators across the U.S. and the world.

Realizing our vision requires combining biological experimentation and new theories grounded in mathematics. Research supported by NITMB is structured so that theorists and experimentalists collaborate on experimental design and data analysis, as well as modeling. NITMB research also supports the development of new mathematics inspired by biology. Internal research projects support NITMB researchers and bring together faculty from participating institutions. A National Pilot Projects Program funds high-risk projects, each with a one-year funding period.  The program's aim is to recruit new mathematical scientists and biologists into collaborating on seed projects. NITMB has an innovative research program organized around five interrelated themes, selected because they reflect key capabilities of biological systems and interconnect with open mathematical problems. These themes establish bridges across subdisciplines of biological and mathematical sciences, ensuring that research in one domain will support advances in the others. The themes also reflect our cross-disciplinary organizational structure, insuring that our training and community-building activities foster deep interactions across disciplines. 

The Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems

The Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems was founded in 2004 with the goals of uncovering fundamental principles governing complex systems in science, technology, and human behavior and applying these principles to solve societally relevant problems through the analysis, design, and control of complex systems. Today, NICO serves as a hub and facilitator for pathbreaking research in complexity and data science transcending the boundaries of established disciplines.