NEWS

e-Newsletter Volume 6 Issue 2 | March 2026 Personal Remarks by Dr. Remo Rohs I want to start with congratulating Professors Peter Calabrese and Michael ‘Doc’ Edge on their respective Dornsife Teaching and Junior Raubenheimer Awards. This year’s trifecta of Dornsife awards for QCB faculty is also a recognition of the department at its 5th birthday. Way to go! With screening exams on the horizon, the second year Ph.D. students held a mentoring kickoff event for the first year P

Please welcome QBIO freshman Kathlyn Phan (left) as the QCB Department's new QBIO student liaison! She will be putting together the monthly newsletter and organizing the peer mentorship program. The QCB department thanks QBIO senior Karen Lee (right) for filling this position for the last two years with much commitment to the newsletter and mentorship program, while also serving as the President of the QBIO student association.

Two of our QBIO graduates who went to Medical School at the Keck School of Medicine of USC have matched for their residency programs. Jonathan Le B.S.'22 (left) matched for anesthesiology at UCLA, and Kate Manley (Guion) B.S.'21 (right) matched for plastic surgery at the University of Washington. Congrats, Kate and Jonathan! It is wonderful to see the successful paths of our graduates.

CBB graduate student Wei Yu Tang competed earlier this month in the LA Marathon. Wei Yu completed the marathon with a fantastic result despite the unusually hot day. We are proud of you, Wei Yu!

QCB joint faculty Dr. Andrei Irimia published a paper titled “Women's reproductive factors predict local brain aging profiles mapped using deep neural networks” in Geroscience . Please read the paper here .

QCB joint faculty Dr. Andrei Irimia (left), with the participation of QCB student Fangyun Liu (right), published a paper titled “Segmentation and morphometry of intracranial internal carotid artery calcification in relation to brain atrophy” in Neuroradiology . Please find the paper here .

QCB joint faculty Dr. Andrei Irimia published a paper titled “Deep survival modelling to predict future cognitive impairment in unimpaired adults” in Journals of Gerontology Series A . Please read the paper here .

QCB student Handan Cetin (left) from Dr. Stacey Finley's (right) lab, in collaboration with Mann School of Pharmacy, published a paper titled “Cancer-associated fibroblasts drive metabolic heterogeneity in colorectal cancer cells: predictions from metabolic modeling” in NPJ Systems Biology Applications . The modeling suggests that targeting cancer-associated fibroblasts metabolic interactions may improve treatment strategies for KRAS-mutant colorectal cancer. Please read the

QBIO graduate and current Keck Medicine MD student, Kate Manley (left), and QCB joint faculty member Dr. Jerry Lee (right) from the Ellison Medical Institute published an article in the journal Health Systems about the importance of data accessibility for molecular medicine and cancer research. Please read the paper here .

CBB student Shirin Nataneli (top left) from Dr. Jazlyn Mooney's (top right) lab published a paper titled “Analytical expectations for ancestry junction accumulation in admixed genomes” in Genetics with contributions from CBB students, Aydin Loid Karatas (bottom left) and Tessa Ferrari (bottom right), as well as former QCB postdoc Roshni Patel. This work provides a mathematical model that tracks how recombination and a population’s history shape patterns of ancestry switches

CBB PhD student Rachel Yuqiu Wang (left) from Dr. Fengzhu Sun’s (right) group published a tutorial paper, “Benchmarking alignment strategies for Hi-C reads in metagenomic Hi-C data” in Genome Biology . The study identified the best tools for aligning metagenomic HiC reads to contigs in metagenomic HiC studies. Alum Dr. Yuxuan Du and Dr. Fengzhu Sun co-supervised the project. Please read the paper here .

CBB graduate Dr. Yingfei Wang (top left) and research specialist Dr. Jinsen Li (top right) from the Rohs lab, with contributions from core faculty Dr. Tsu-Pei Chiu (bottom left) and CBB alumna Dr. Bei Xin (bottom right), published a paper in NAR Genomics and Bioinformatics on the sequence-based modeling of low-affinity transcription factor-DNA binding. The work showed the ability to use deep learning methods to reveal functional low affinity binding sites in the genome. Plea