UConn has been selected to join the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s (HHMI) Science Education Alliance-Phage Hunters Advancing Genomics and Evolutionary Science (SEA-PHAGES) program in the 11th cohort of schools. MCB faculty Carol Teschke, Simon White, Peter Gogarten and Noah Reid applied to be part of the program, in which first or second year undergraduates participate in a two-semester, discovery-based undergraduate research course that begins with simple digging in the soil to find new bacterial viruses, but progresses through a variety of microbiology techniques and eventually to complex genome annotation and bioinformatic analyses.