NEWS

e-Newsletter Volume 5 Issue 8 | December 2025 Personal Remarks by Dr. Remo Rohs As the year 2025 winds down, I want to thank all staff, faculty, and students for their hard work, resiliency, and commitment to excellence in education and research. This was a particularly difficult year for our wonderful staff, and I was really impressed with their commitment and work ethic. This month, the Director of Graduate Studies, Dr. Fengzhu Sun, and I met with the first- and second-year

QBIO undergraduate students presented their final projects for the research class QBIO 490 in the presence of QCB faculty, including Dr. Jerry Lee and other faculty from the Ellison Medical Institute, and Dr. Lee's collaborators from the federal government's APOLLO program.

QBIO student Matthew Genchev received the Provost Fellowship for Spring 2026. He will be combining analytical and simulation models to better understand how (and when) Channel Island foxes ended up on each of the five islands they inhabit.

The very first student who joined the QBIO major, Nicholas Markarian, a graduate from 2020, defended his dissertation "Interpretable Mixtures of Latent Variable Models for Gene Covariation from Pathways to Transcriptomes" at Caltech this month. Nicholas is an M.D./Ph.D. student in the joint Caltech/Keck School of Medicine program.

CBB Ph.D. student Dallace Francis (Sun lab) successfully defended his dissertation, "Computational Methods for Improving the Generalizability of Microbiome Research".

CBB Ph.D. student Yingfei Wang (Rohs lab, pictured with her dissertation committee) successfully defended her dissertation, "Understanding Transcription Factor–DNA Binding: From Sequence and Local Shape to DNA Conformation and Flexibility".

CBB Ph.D. student Tessa Ferrari (left) from Dr. Jazlyn Mooney's (right) group received the Simons Graduate Fellowships in Ecology and Evolution . Her project will combine genomics and evolutionary simulations to better understand how endangered species survive despite small population sizes and low genetic diversity. She will use Ethiopian wolves as her study system because they have long existed in small populations and remain critically endangered.

Dr. Jordy Homing Lam, a QCB postdoc and Croucher Fellow in Dr. Katritch’s lab, will start the new year 2026 in a new postdoc position at UC Berkeley. Best wishes to Jordy in his new endeavors!

QCB joint faculty Dr. Andrei Irimia (left) published a paper in Geroscience titled  “Deep neural networks and genome-wide associations reveal the polygenic architecture of local brain aging”,  also with a contribution from Dr. Paul Thompson (right), another QCB joint faculty. Please read the paper here .