Nishan launches its first research cohort with seven interdisciplinary teams

The students will spend the next several weeks working on research projects across the life sciences, mathematical sciences, and computational sciences. Each team works with a mentor throughout the research process, from developing its initial question and reviewing the literature through analysis and manuscript preparation. The cohort is designed to give students experience with the full research process, including the parts that happen after a research question has been defined.

Seven teams, seven research questions

The first cohort includes projects spanning several areas of scientific inquiry:

• Evolutionary Conservation of Dormancy Mechanisms Across the Tree of Life — examining how dormancy mechanisms have evolved across diverse organisms and whether common biological strategies have been conserved across evolutionary lineages.
• Spectral Stability of Graph Laplacians Under Structured Edge Perturbations — investigating whether structured changes to a graph produce consistent patterns in its spectral properties.
• Persistent Homology as a Framework for Detecting Structural Phase Transitions in Dynamic Social Networks — testing whether topological invariants can identify structural changes in dynamic networks.
• Spatial Transcriptomic Profiling of Tumor-Associated Macrophage Polarization States Mediated by TGF-β1 Signaling Gradient in Pancreatic Ductal Adenocarcinoma Microenvironment — examining how spatial TGF-β1 signaling may influence macrophage polarization within pancreatic cancer.
• Epigenetic Aging as a Predictor of Immune Decline Across the Human Lifespan — investigating whether epigenetic age acceleration is associated with changes in immune composition and function.
• Graph-Based Evidence Selection for Improving Retrieval-Augmented Generation in Large Language Models — studying whether retrieval systems can improve by selecting evidence for diversity and complementary information rather than similarity alone.
• Graph Neural Networks for Individualized Prediction of Alzheimer's Disease Progression — testing whether representing brain regions as connected graphs can improve individualized predictions of disease progression.

Students work with university mentors

Each team is paired with a mentor based on the relationship between the mentor's academic background and the team's research area. Mentors help students work through the practical decisions involved in research, including narrowing questions, evaluating literature, choosing analytical approaches, interpreting results, and communicating findings.

The teams work collaboratively throughout the internship. Rather than separating research into individual assignments, each project is organized around a shared question and a manuscript that the team develops together.

The work continues through peer review

The internship will culminate in a research manuscript for each team. After completing their projects, teams will have the opportunity to submit their manuscripts to Nishan's new research journal. Submissions will be eligible for a double-blind peer-review process, in which reviewers evaluate the work without being given the identities of the authors.

Publication will depend on the outcome of that process. The aim is to give students experience with an important part of research that is often absent from introductory programs: having their work evaluated by others.

Building Nishan's research program

The first seven teams are the beginning of Nishan's research program. More than 28 students will participate in the inaugural cohort, working alongside university mentors on questions that range from evolutionary biology and cancer research to graph theory and artificial intelligence. 

"Most internships hand a student a task list and call it research. We wanted something different. Students on this team are going to hit dead ends, realize their first question wasn't the right one, and have to defend their work to someone who isn't going to just nod along," said Luke Siravakian, Founder and Executive Director of Nishan. "That's what research actually feels like, and honestly it's the part most programs skip because it's messy and hard to schedule."

The first cohort begins its multi-week internships this month. Teams will continue developing their projects and manuscripts throughout the program, with completed work eligible for consideration through Nishan's forthcoming peer-review and publication process.