A message fom Dr.Timothy Allen, director of UVA's NSF REU in Multi-scale Systems Bioenginering and Biomedical Data Science Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many students throughout the country have been left without any kind of opportunity to gain experience this summer. Internships, REU experiences and summer research in faculty labs have been cancelled. Many students' summer plans are completely in limbo. As our BME department chairFred Epsteinhas been quick to point out, for rising seniors at smaller institutions, or institutions without resources in computational modeling and biomedical data science, this may be the last opportunity for a pivotal experience prior to graduation.The cancellation of summer research and internships may especially harm underrepresented students in STEM, asthis articleattests.