NEWS

e-Newsletter Volume 6 Issue 5 | August 2026 Personal Remarks by Dr. Remo Rohs I want to welcome (or welcome back) all our students, staff, and faculty. It is wonderful to see once again how the campus has transformed with the beginning of Fall semester classes, after a summer filled with lots of exciting research in many of our QCB labs. This academic year, the QCB department started offering a Dornsife Intensive in AI for Molecular Biology. The intensive is a mini-minor thro

CBB PhD Student Bryan Dinh (left) and QCB faculty Dr. Charleston Chiang (right) published a paper in Genes & Nutrition titled “Incorporating dietary information to enhance polygenic prediction models with applications to body mass index and type 2 diabetes.” Please read the paper here.

The QCB department welcomed our newest QBIO Freshmen cohort and welcomed back all our QBIO undergraduates to the new academic year with an ice cream social. The photo shows Dr. Rohs (left) with the departmental QBIO Liaison Kathlyn Phan (center) and the new President of the QBIO Student Association Richard Zhang (right).

QCB faculty Dr. Doc Edge (left) and QCB research scientist Dr. Josh Schraiber, in collaboration with former CBB student Qifan Wang (right) and former QCB faculty Dr. Matt Pennell, published a paper in Evolution Letters, "Characterizing and mitigating confounding by unreplicated evolutionary events in phylogenetic regression." Please read the paper here.

QCB faculty Dr. Remo Rohs gave the one keynote address at the Next Gen Conversations at Louisiana Tech in Ruston, LA. This meeting is a continuation of the legendary Conversations in Biomolecular Structure and Dynamics held for more than 40 years in Albany, NY. The photo shows Dr. Rohs with the 2024 keynote speaker and pioneer in nucleic acid structure analysis, Dr. Wilma Olson.

QCB faculty Dr. Jazlyn Mooney was interviewed by the Genetics Society of America on her path to securing a tenure-track faculty position. In the interview, Dr. Mooney shares very valuable insights on the academic job search. Read the interview here.

QCB joint faculty Dr. Arthur Toga published a paper in Alzheimer’s and Dementia, titled "Association of cognitive impairment and APOE ε4 with Centiloids in Hispanic and non-Hispanic White cohorts.”. Please read the paper here.

The department welcomes two new faculty members with primary appointments in QCB. Dr. Jinsen Li (left) was reapppointed as Instructor and Research Specialist. He will co-teach algorithms courses at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. Dr. Yingfei Wang (right) was selected by the Dornsife College as new Dornsife Teaching Fellow with an instructor-rank appointment in QCB. She will teach GSEM 160 Freshmen seminars on AI and statistics in biology.

QCB joint faculty Dr. Christoph A. Haselwandter, in collaboration with Nobel Laureate Dr. Roderick MacKinnon, published a paper in PNAS “Biomolecular assemblies through weak noncovalent interactions: Higher-order transient structures and their condensate phase”. Please read the paper here.

QCB joint faculty Dr. Naomi Levine published a paper in Cell Host & Microbe, titled "Life out of equilibrium: Rethinking how we quantify and model marine microbial phenotypes.” Please read the paper here.

QCB joint faculty Dr. Scott Fraser received the Distinguished Scientist Award in the Biological Sciences for the Year of 2026 from the Microscopy Society of America. Congrats, Scott!

Former QCB student Dr. Jesse Weller (left) from Dr. Remo Rohs' (right) lab, published a first-author paper, “Circumventing the Synthesizability Problem in Generative Molecular Design” in the Journal of Chemical Informatics and Modeling. The study introduces a model-guided virtual screening pipeline to identify synthesizable analogues of generated compounds in existing ultralarge compound databases. Please read the paper here.