Project Summary Gene regulatory network (GRN) science combines experimental approaches at any scale, from single gene to genome wide, together with computational modeling approaches and incorporates the insights gained from these analyses into a framework used to explain the causality of developmental processes and animal evolution. Expanding our understanding of GRNs has been identified as one of the research priorities of the Developmental Biology branch of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. The key objective of this short course on GRNs is to help students develop a conceptual understanding of developmental control mechanisms that serves as a basis to formulate research questions and hypotheses, and to learn how to apply diverse experimental and computational approaches to solve them. Students will take away from this course a sense for how systems level explanations can be obtained for developmental processes in any biological context using a variety of experimental and computational techniques. This will be accomplished through an intensive series of lectures, discussions, and hands-on workshops using computational methods to analyze big data from a large number of studies in order to construct comprehensible models for gene networks that guide development.