August 2026 QCB Newsletter

Sep 2

6 min read

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 through which students can earn an additional academic credential by taking three QBIO courses on ML/AI in biology.

The first inspiring event of the semester was the Dornsife Undergraduate Student Welcome where the QCB faculty welcomed the incoming Freshmen class (photo below). With Dean Dr. James Bullock personally cheering for our students, this can only be a fantastic year!

Remo Rohs, Ph.D.

Department Chair

QCB Faculty

QCB faculty Dr. Doc Edge successfully renewed an R35 MIRA award from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences titled “Traits on trees: Population genomics for understanding complex phenotypes”, which will provide funds for the Edge lab for the next five years.

Dr. Remo Rohs also renewed his NIH R35 MIRA award. The grant will support his computational and experimental labs' research on the broadened project "Quantitative Modeling of Protein-Nucleic Acid Binding".

QCB faculty Dr. Steve Kay received a new R01 from the National Cancer Institute entitled "Discovery of novel small molecules targeting a circadian regulatory complex for cancer therapeutics”. The grant supports a suite of high-throughput assays Dr. Kay’s lab has developed to identify small molecule ligands for the core clock proteins CRY1, BMAL1, and CLOCK.

The department welcomes two new faculty members with primary appointments in QCB. Dr. Jinsen Li was reapppointed as Instructor and Research Specialist. He will co-teach algorithms courses at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. Dr. Yingfei Wang 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 faculty Dr. Tsu-Pei Chiu presented the new Dornsife Intensive, AI for Molecular Biology, in Washington DC at the international conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology, which is the annual flagship meeting of the International Society for Computational Biology. A Dornsife Intensive is a mini-minor consisting of three courses, in this case on machine learning and artificial intelligence in molecular biology. Click for more details here.

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 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 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!

QCB Publications

QCB faculty Dr. Doc Edge and QCB research scientist Dr. Josh Schraiber, in collaboration with former CBB student Qifan Wang 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 postdoc Dr. Xingchi Yan from Dr. Geoff Fudenberg’s lab published, as a co-first author, a paper in Nucleic Acids Research, "Antibody-trapping presents a widespread pitfall for microscopy and genomics in the nucleus.” This paper reveals a far-reaching artifact affecting antibody-based techniques in the cell nucleus, that required joint expertise from four labs to be fully characterized. Please read the paper here.

Former QCB student Dr. Jesse Weller from Dr. Remo Rohs' 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.

Research scientist Dr. Anastasiia Sadybekov and former QCB postdocs Dr. Antonina Nazarova and Dr. Arman Sadybekov, from Dr. Katritch’s lab, published, as co-first authors, a paper in NPJ Drug Discovery titled “V-SYNTHES2 --- the next generation tool for structure-based virtual screening of giga-scale chemical spaces”. The study is a major update of the V-SYNTHES method, developed in Dr. Katritch’s lab, automating and expanding the application of the algorithm to more than 36 billion compounds and new targets. Please read the paper here.

CBB student Yongchan (Chan) Hong, CS student Ao Xu, and former QCB postdoc Dr. Jordy Homing Lam from Dr. Katritch’s lab published, as co-first authors, the paper in Nucleic Acid Research, titled “PLATE-VS: a web server for protein-ligand assay curation and cross-target virtual screening datasets.” The paper introduces new datasets for training and testing drug discovery models. Please read the paper here.

CBB PhD Student Bryan Dinh and QCB faculty Dr. Charleston Chiang 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.

QCB joint faculty Andrei Irimia published a paper in PNAS titled “Deep learning maps local brain aging in relation to cognition across human adulthood.” Please read the paper here.

Dr. Irimia published another paper in NeuroImage on spatial transcriptomic decoupling and magnetic resonance imaging in Alzheimer's disease (read the paper here) and a third paper in Geroscience, titled " Genome-wide analysis of subcortical aging identifies a spatially structured pattern of genetic associations.” (read the paper here.)

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. Stacey Finley published a paper in PLoS Computational Biology titled “ A multiscale, Bayesian inference approach to augment mechanistic models of cell signaling with machine-learning predictions of binding affinity.” 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 Drs. Gazal, Mancuso, and Durvasula published a paper in Cell Genomics titled "Identifying independent causal cell types for human diseases and risk variants.” Please read the paper here.

QCB Professor Emeritus Dr. Andrew McMahon published a review titled “Developmental Programming of Human Kidney Function” in Annual Reviews in Cell Developmental Biology. Please read the paper here.

QCB joint faculty Dr. Paul Thomson published a paper in Frontiers in Neurology titled " Multi-modal deep learning and explainable AI for predicting multiple dementia-related neuropathologies from brain MRI, clinical, and genetic data.” Please read the paper 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.

CBB PhD Students

Edge lab PhD student Dandan Peng successfully defended and completed her dissertation. She will soon start work as a postdoctoral researcher in Dr. Amy Goldberg's lab at UCLA.

CBB PhD student Yongchan Hong from Drs. Seva Katritch and Yan Liu labs presented a poster and two talks at the 32nd ACM KDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining in Korea, and received an Outstanding Paper Award for his presentation titled “Trustworthy Protein-Ligand Binding Affinity Prediction via Reliability-Aware Multi-Engine Fusion”. Congratulations Chan!

CBB Ph.D. students and senior members of the Rohs Lab attended the international conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology, which is the annual flagship meeting of the International Society for Computational Biology, in Washnington DC. They presented their work in three talks and seven posters during the meeting.

QBIO Undergraduate Students

QCB faculty and staff welcomed incoming Freshmen at the Dornsife Undergraduate Welcome. The photo shows Dornsife Dean Dr. James Bullock and QCB chair Dr. Remo Rohs in conversation with some of the newest Dornsife undergraduate students.

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 with the departmental QBIO Liaison Kathlyn Phan and the new President of the QBIO Student Association Richard Zhang.

Upcoming Events

Seminar Schedule (all in RRI 101 @ 2pm)

September 3rd: Dr. Evanthia Roussos Torres (USC)

September 10th: Dr. Weichuan Yu (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology)

September 17th: Dr. Jeffrey Spence (UCSF)

September 24th: Dr. Julia Zeitlinger (Stowers Institute)

Our mailing address is:

1050 Childs Way, RRI 201, Los Angeles, CA 90089-2019

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