NEWS

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 .

QCB joint faculty Dr. Paul Thomas published a paper in the Journal of Molecular Evolution titled “OrthoGrafter: Rapid Identification of Orthologs from Precomputed Placement in Phylogenetic Trees.” Please read the paper here .

QCB faculty Dr Fengzhu Sun contributed to a study published in Communications Biology titled ”ViTrace detects viral signatures in tumor transcriptomes using a hybrid language model”. The method provides a scalable framework for guiding precision oncology and characterizing tumor-associated viruses. This is a joint work with a former visiting scholar at USC, Dr. Ying Wang, from Xiamen University, China. Please read the paper here .

QCB postdoc Dr. Jordy Homing Lam (left) from Dr. Seva Katritch’s (right) lab published a review in NPJ Drug Discovery titled "Navigating structure-based drug discovery with emerging innovations in physics- and knowledge-based approaches”. Please read the paper here .

QCB faculty Dr. Liang Chen (left), as the last author, and former CBB Ph.D. student Dr. Wei Jiang (right), as the first author, published a paper in Nature Communications titled “The implications of alternative splicing regulation for maximum lifespan.” The study identifies conserved, lifespan-associated splicing programs and highlights alternative splicing as a genetically programmed axis of longevity beyond gene expression changes. Please read the paper here .

QCB faculty Dr. Geoffrey Fudenberg (top left) and his former lab members Smit Kadvani (top right) and Bozhena Pokorny (bottom), contributed to a Science paper titled “Synergy between regulatory elements can render cohesin dispensable for distal enhancer function”. The paper, led by the Nora Lab at UCSF, describes how 3D genome folding impacts gene regulation, with Fudenberg’s lab contributing transcriptomic analyses. Please read the paper here .

CBB Ph.D. student Obadiah Mulder (left) from Dr. Doc Edge’s (right) lab published a paper titled “An agent-based model of metabolic signaling oscillations in Bacillus subtilis biofilms” in PLoS Computational Biology . The authors built an agent-based model of nutrient consumption and flow in a bacterial biofilm that reproduces oscillatory signaling behavior observed in in vitro Bacillus subtilis biofilms. The model shows how an apparent collective, coordinated behavior ca

Dr. Maxime Tortora (left), a QCB postdoc in Dr. Geoffrey Fudenberg’s (right) lab, published a paper in Cell Genomics titled “The physical chemistry of interphase loop extrusion”. The paper describes a kinetic model of how regulatory proteins control the dynamics of the motor protein complexes that organize our genomes. Please read the paper here .

Keck School of Medicine and Viterbi School of Engineering faculty have recently joined the faculty of the Department of Quantitative and Computational Biology. Our new QCB joint faculty include Dr. Arun Durvasula (Assistant Professor of Population and Public Health Sciences, top left), Dr. Sheng Li (Associate Professor of Cancer Biology, top right), Dr. Ruishan Lui (Gabilan Assistant Professor of Computer Science, bottom left), and Dr. Chang (April) Shu (Assistant Professor o

e-Newsletter Volume 5 Issue 7 | October & November 2025 Personal Remarks by Dr. Remo Rohs The QCB Department’s meeting with parents and families of current and prospective QBIO students on Trojan Family Weekend is one of my favorite events in the Fall semester. One theme has always been that a biology education requires quantitative training. A result of this is that our acceptance rate for Medical School and MD/PhD programs is still 100%. This year, parents were acutely awar