NEWS

QCB faculty Dr. Geoffrey Fudenberg received funding from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation as one of several co-PIs at USC. The grant supports Dr. Maxime Tortora, a postdoc in the Fudenberg lab, and the lab's research into genome organization.

Drs. Brendon Cooper (top left), Tsu-Pei Chiu (top right), and Raktim Mitra (bottom left) from the Rohs Lab (bottom right) published a collaborative paper in Science Advances that uses quantitative imaging of fly wings to study the relationship between phenotype, spatial expression levels, and transcription factor binding. The work provides new mechanistic insights in enhancer function. Please read the paper here .

QCB joint faculty Nobel Laureate Dr. Arieh Warshel published a study, “Exploring evolutionary trajectories of drug resistance” in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . The study (read here ) was also featured in USC News here .

QCB joint faculty Dr. Paul Thompson has published a paper titled “Deep learning to predict future cognitive decline: a multimodal approach using brain MRI and clinical data” in Frontiers in Neuroimaging . Please read the paper here .

QCB faculty Dr. Helen Berman was selected as a 2026 Fellow of The Protein Society. With this honor, The Protein Society celebrates members of the Society who have demonstrated excellent scientific contributions and service to the community. Congratulations, Helen!

QCB reserch scientist Dr. Anastasiia Sadybekov gave a talk, while Dr. Woojin Lee and CBB student Yongchan Hong from Dr. Katritch's lab presented posters at the 4th Drug Discovery Innovation Workshop, organized by CNT3D, which brought together more than 200 participants from all over USC and SoCal biopharma community.

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".