When Diana Murray first started working with two high school students on an online summer cancer systems biology course in 2018, she never imagined that the initiative, now called DREAM-High, would snowball to 56 participants by 2026. “The class started as a consolation prize for high school students who didn’t get selected for a different program funded by the Palazzo Strozzi Foundation,” shares Murray, who in addition to being a computational systems biologist is also the Program Director of Research and Education at Columbia University. And she proceeds to explain.

Not many American academic institutions can boast a connection to Palazzo Strozzi, a 14th century masterpiece of Renaissance architecture and a foundation that supports it, but Columbia University’s Department of Systems Biology is a special case. Andrea Califano, who is a Professor of Chemical and Systems Biology and one of the department cofounders and chairmen, is originally from Italy. “He knows people from the Palazzo Strozzi Foundation USA,” explains Murray. Established in 2010, the Foundation works to introduce American students to Italian culture, arts and history. Every year, the Foundation offers the High School Renaissance Award to 18 students to spend a month in Italy studying the renaissance, the culture and the arts.

About 500 students apply, and those who aren’t selected are understandably disappointed. To offer them an alternative, the program organizers had asked Califano whether Columbia University could create some form of a science program so that students who weren’t chosen to go, could apply for it. Califano said yes.

Back in 2018, Columbia participated in an undergraduate cancer biology course funded by the National Institute of Health’s Cancer Systems Biology Consortium (CSBC). “That undergraduate course was very successful, but then two of my high school students who weren’t chosen to go to Italy took it and they loved it!” Murray says. “So we decided to make this course accessible to other high school students. The undergraduate course was called Mini-DREAM, so we named the high school course DREAM-High.”