  We present a coupled pair approach for studying few-body physics in
harmonically trapped ultracold gases. The method is applied to a two-component
Fermi system of $N$ particles. A stochastically variational gaussian expansion
method is applied, focusing on optimization of the two-body correlations
present in the strongly interacting, or unitary, limit. The groundstate energy
of the four-, six- and eight-body problem with equal spin populations is
calculated with high accuracy and minimal computational effort. We also
calculate the structural properties of these systems and discuss their
implication for the many-body ultracold gas and other few-body calculations.
