Course-based Undergraduate Research Experience (CUREs)

CUREs is a program dedicated to expanding research opportunities for students in the Biology Department at Texas A&M.

Our mission is to expand access to transformative real research experiences that inspire and prepare the next generation of scientists!

Undergraduate research experiences are linked to improved student success and are often important to future employers and for admission into graduate and medical programs. However, undergraduate research positions are limited and often difficult to obtain. The CUREs program addresses that gap by providing a dedicated laboratory spaces designed to accommodate larger groups of undergraduate students and engage them in authentic, hands-on research with department faculty members.

CUREs labs empower students to work independently, develop critical research skills, contribute meaningfully to cutting-edge scientific research, and build a strong foundation for future STEM careers.

Join our program and work alongside world renowned scientists in state of the art research laboratories!

About - Program Structure

Each semester, select CUREs sections are uniquely paired with a Primary Investigator (PI). Our PIs/Scientists will lead students on innovative and exciting new research projects.

These sections are offered as BIOL 491 research credit courses. Enrolling in a CUREs section is equivalent to joining the PI’s lab, with research conducted in a dedicated CUREs laboratory space. As a student researcher, you will work alongside your peers on innovative and impactful projects.

Many of our faculty have participated in the program. Please see below for past projects in CUREs. You may also look to our Faculty Directory to see the diversity of research interests in our department!

We are excited to offer this unique, once in a lifetime opportunity to our students! Because the projects in CUREs are real hands-on research, students get the chance to publish work and make meaningful contributions to the international scientific community.

Hope to see you soon in one of our labs!

Inspiring and nurturing scientific curiosity in the scientists of tomorrow!

Dr. Heath Blackmon with his Fall 2025 CUREs students doing some fun bioinformatics.

Take a look at the groundbreaking work our CUREs undergraduate researchers have done during the summer and will continue to work on in the fall in Dr. Joshua Lillvis’ lab!

Students in the Neural Circuit Reconstruction CURE course are working to map brain circuits in a variety of species to better understand how brains differ across individuals and evolve. To capture high resolution images of the brain that can be traced and mapped, researchers in the Lillvis Lab physically expand brains up to 50 times their original size. This enables the lab to rapidly capture high-resolution images of the brain using light microscopes. Teams of students then trace individual neurons (multicolor) in those brains to reconstruct neural circuits.

Individual neurons (multicolor) were traced in a 20x expanded Drosophila fruit fly brain.

traced individual neurons of fruit fly's brain

Individual courtship circuit neurons (multicolor) were traced in a 20x expanded Drosophila fruit fly brain.

Traced Individual courtship circuit neurons of fruit fly's brain

How to Join

Each semester, sections and dates for open registration will be announced on the Project Announcement Board below.

There is no application process for any of these sections. We are trying to make research more accessible and open to students like you! You can register for the matching project of your choice on Aggie Schedule Builder/Howdy. After registration and closer to the start of the semester, you will receive and email with a Research Approval Form and instructions for the first week.

A few important things to consider before registering for a section:

Please review the prerequisites carefully before signing up, as each section has specific requirements that must be met.
Expected hours of work are 3x the credit hours listed. For example, PIs will expect you to work at least 9 hours/week if you are registered for a 3 credit hour class.
U1/U2 students should register for 291 and U3/U4 register for 491.
Students on scholastic probation are NOT permitted to participate in BIOL 291/491.
Students must accept the Lab Safety Acknowledgement on Howdy for the semester they intend to participate in BIOL291/491.
Students will be required to take several lab safety training courses as well as lab specific safety training. Information will be sent out to registered students couple of weeks before the semester start.

Additionally, this section is primarily focused on independent research. Students are responsible for completing the required credit hours accordingly. In most cases, these hours must be fulfilled during open lab times, which are generally available from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Monday through Friday.

Aside from the mandatory two-hour weekly meeting listed on Howdy, students will have flexibility in managing their own schedules to ensure they complete their required credit hours.

Please ensure that your schedule allows sufficient time during these hours to meet the course requirements.

Project Announcement Board

All sections are closed and in progress for Summer 2026

Fall Projects 2026

*Students can sign up for their project of choice during open registration on Howdy. Spots are first-come first serve.

Caenorhadbitis elegans

LeBoeuf Lab

Prerequisites: BIOL 111, BIOL 112, BIOL 213

BIOL 491 Section 584 - 2 Credit hours -- Thursday 2PM-4PM

Stressed out? There's a pathway for that! In this research-intensive course you will use the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, an established laboratory model organism, to address how organisms remodel muscle during development even under stress conditions. The project will involce creating genetic tools that allow for exploration of what tissues must respond to stress for muscles to properly remodel. Students will learn animal husbandry, microscopy, and experimental set up techniques.

Neural Circuit Reconstruction

Lillvis Lab

Prerequisites: None

BIOL 491 Section 576 - 2 Credit Hours -- Tuesday 10AM-12PM

BIOL 491 Section 577 - 3 Credit Hours -- Tuesday 2PM-4PM

Neural circuits are the foundation of behavior. However, we know little about how circuit wiring changes with age and disease, how variations in wiring contribute to behavior variations found across individuals, or how wiring differences enable behaviors to evolve. Investigation these questions requires the synaptic structure of circuits to be compared across many animals, but current methods are too slow and costly to achieve this. To overcome these limitations, the Lillvis lab is developing new expansion microscopy-based methods to rapidly reconstruct neural circuits. This class will focus on evaluating these methods by analyzing brain images and reconstructing neural circuits in fruit flies, spiders, bees, and fish. The research we conduct will help us improve our expansion and imaging methods and generate fully automated methods to reconstruct neural circuits in the future.

Novel Virus Genome Discovery - Bioinformatics

Neuman Lab

Prerequisites: None

BIOL 291 Section 580 - 2 Credit Hours -- Thursday 11AM-1PM

BIOL 491 Section 580 - 2 Credit Hours -- Thursday 11AM-1PM

BIOL 291 Section 582 - 2 Credit Hours -- Thursday 2PM-4PM

BIOL 491 Section 579 - 2 Credit Hours -- Thursday 2PM-4PM

BIOL 291 Section 581 - 2 Credit Hours -- Thursday 4PM-6PM

BIOL 491 Section 582 - 2 Credit Hours -- Thursday 4PM-6PM

For every living organism, there is a virus that infects it. When people go out and sample an organism, sometimes that organism is sick with a virus. These accidental bycatch viruses are sequenced and stored in transcriptome databases. We're looking at neglected virus hosts because these kinds of viruses are under characterized, so we want to help in finding and describing them. By describing these viruses that infect these underrepresented hosts, we can better understand how all the viruses in that group function. The broader impacts of this work could be used for things like conservation efforts or pest control.

Students find viruses from the Transcriptome Shotgun Assembly (TSA) database using reference protein sequences via tBLASTn. The genome arrangement is then annotated and built using ORFfinder and HHPRED.

**This is a bioinformatics lab with no wet lab component. Everything is done on your computer.

You can find more information about the project here: https://forms.gle/wPSAsakyLcZtJNbM7

Changing Climates and Cassiopea xamachana

Strader Lab

Prerequisites: BIOL 111, BIOL 112, BIOL 214

BIOL 491 Section 578 - 3 Credit Hours -- Tuesday 1PM-3PM

Organisms are consistently having to respond to rapidly changing climates. This challenges organisms to adapt, acclimate, or move, requiring fundamental knowledge about organisms’ ecology and evolution. To study this, we will utilize a partially clonal marine jellyfish species, Cassiopea xamachana, to understand the complex role genetics and evolution play in how organisms are able to respond to differences in their environment (ecology). We will learn fundamentals about life-history evolution, quantify aspects of fitness, and test how it changes under different environmental parameters. This research will contribute to our lab’s ongoing investigations into the mechanisms enabling the proliferation of C. xamachana in tropical and subtropical Florida.

Finis Shale Micropaleontology

Neuman Lab

Prerequisites: BIOL 111, BIOL 112

BIOL 491 Section 583 - 3 Credit Hours -- Friday 10AM-12PM

Students will collect, clean, sort and identify microfossils from the an upper Paleozoic Era site located in Texas. The fossil site is known for exceptional preservation of marine organisms, ease of preparation, and extraordinary biodiversity. Microfossils will be used to prepare a publication answering an unanswered paleontological question. Examples of such questions would include describing early developmental stages of known species, or describing new species. Taught course content will include primers on identification and development of common fossil groups, paleontological methods, specimen photography, and writing or emending species descriptions.

Functional characterization of oncogene

Sarkar Lab

Prerequisites: BIOL 111, BIOL 112, BIOL 213

BIOL 491 Section 585 - 3 Credit Hours

This course-based undergraduate research experience introduces students to the functional role of an oncogene in cancer cells. Using basic cell culture, proliferation, migration, and gene expression assays, along with Bioinformatics analyses, students will investigate how oncogene expression alters cell behavior. The course emphasizes hands-on experimentation, data analysis, and the connection of molecular changes to cancer-related phenotypes.

Light it up: Antibody validation across species

Truchado Garcia Lab

Prerequisites : None

BIOL 491 Section 587 - 3 Credit Hours -- Monday 2PM - 4 PM

Antibodies are essential tools for detecting specific proteins across several applications, from basic research to medical diagnostics to veterinary testing. However, every antibody must first be validated to confirm it actually binds its target with the specificity and sensitivity researchers need. Because antibodies don’t exist for every protein in every organism, and developing new ones remains expensive even with emerging technologies, labs often rely on evolutionary conservation: testing whether an existing antibody cross-reacts in the experimental organism of interest. Using an unvalidated antibody is a real financial risk, since labs must purchase these reagents and test them with no guarantees. In this course, students will validate antibodies for partner companies and institutions in different species and organoids, using confocal imaging and, where needed, cryo-sectioning to characterize the resulting staining pattern in detail. This generates data that benefits everyone: companies gain validated catalog entries, and labs gain confidence that they are buying antibodies that actually work.

Drosophila Behavior Studies

Keene Lab

Prerequisites: BIOL 111, BIOL 112, BIOL 213

BIOL 491 Section 588 - 3 Credit Hours - Wednesday 9AM - 11AM

This project is TBD for the Fall of 2026

In past sections, Dr. Keene has worked on natural variation on sleep behavior using Drosophila Genetic Reference Panel (DGRP), a collection of genetically diverse inbred fly lines. Students explored how variation on sleep and obesogenic diet affects sleep regulation and aging.

Another project Dr. Keene worked on previously in CUREs was studying Frontotemporal dementia (FTD), a neurodegenerative disease characterized by progressive changes in behavior, personality, and language. Students explored diverse behavioral phenotyping techniques including sleep, locomotion, memory, and feeding assays, and apply them to fly models of FTD.