High school students in a seven-week writing-intensive project at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health serve as research apprentices. This project focuses on students in need of additional development in communication, computation, or scientific background, and creates a research group that carries out original research on a mock epidemic. The project uses a problem-based learning (PBL) approach (Chin and Chia 2008; Massa 2008), applying research and writing skills to the problem of the emergence of a mock communicable disease on the University of Wisconsin campus. Students in this project form an epidemiological task force called U-WHO (University of Wisconsin Health Organization) and design their own projects to study the spread of this imaginary disease, based on research approaches that they have explored in the scientific literature.