January & February 2026 QCB Newsletter

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e-Newsletter Volume 6 Issue 1 | January & February 2026

Personal Remarks by Dr. Remo Rohs

As the year 2026 started, the university saw many changes. We have a new staffing structure that we are adjusting to. I want to express my gratitude to our hard-working staff who often do their new job in addition to their previous job. Thank you so much!

I am very optimistic about our new leadership, both at the college and the university. Dean Bullock and President Kim are fantastic choices, and I am looking forward to working with them. I am convinced that we finally have great opportunities ahead of us.

We just finalized Ph.D. interviews and admissions. We have an ever-increasing number of applicants and are competitive with any school in the country. QCB is widely regarded as a top program and is historically the first Ph.D. program in Computational Biology in the world.

To continued success in 2026,

Remo Rohs, Ph.D.

Department Chair

QBIO Undergraduate Students

Dr. James Bullock, the new Dean of the Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, gave a fascinating guest lecture on non-linear cosmological simulations in Drs. Peter Calabrese's and Remo Rohs' class, QBIO 105 Introduction to Quantitative Biology Seminar.

QCB Faculty

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 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.

QCB Publications

CBB PhD student Yingtong Liu from Dr. Adam Maclean's group developed a new method, iterative logistic regression (iRL) to identify subtle effects in single-cell gene expression datasets. In collaboration with Dr. Evanthia Roussos Torres at the USC Norris Cancer Center, this led to the discovery of myeloid cell differentiation pathways that were perturbed by the treatment of breast cancers with a promising new combination immunotherapy. Please read the paper here.

CBB PhD student Rachel Yuqiu Wang from Dr. Fengzhu Sun’s group published a 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. Former alumni Dr. Yuxuan Du and Dr. Fengzhu Sun co-supervised the project. Please read the paper here.

QCB research scientist Dr. Anastasiia Sadybekov and research associate Dr. Antonina Nazarova from Dr. Seva Katritch’s lab published a paper “Development of potent, selective cPLA2 inhibitors for targeting neuroinflammation in Alzheimer's disease and other neurodegenerative disorders” in NPJ Drug Discovery. The study employed the updated version of the synthon-based screening tool, V-SYNTHES2 to predict cPLA2 inhibitors from 36 billion size chemical space. In collaboration with Dr. Hussein Yassine's lab from USC Keck School of Medicine and Dr. San Louie from Mann School of Pharmacy, the identified hits were optimized and validated in vitro and in vivo as potent anti-inflammatory agents reversing Alzheimer’s pathology in mice models of the disease. Please read the paper here.

Drs. Brendon Cooper, Tsu-Pei Chiu, and Raktim Mitra from the Rohs Lab 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.

Per the invitation of the editor of Current Protocols, Dr. Fengzhu Sun and collaborators published a tutorial, “A Beginner's Guide to Using DeepVirFinder for Viral Sequence Identification From Metagenomic Datasets”. DeepVirFinder is a widely used and cited software package for the identification of viruses from microbial communities. Please find the paper here.

QCB faculty Dr. Steve Kay and collaborators published a paper in The Journal of Clinical Investigation. The study identifies a novel mechanism by which glioblastoma stem cells (GSCs), which drive tumor growth and therapy resistance, evade a form of programmed cell death called cuproptosis. Disrupting the clock machinery or fatty acid desaturation sensitized GSCs to cuproptosis suggests new therapeutic avenues for targeting resistant glioblastoma cells. Please read the paper here.

Second-year CBB PhD student Wei Yu Tang published his second paper with USC affiliation. Wei Yu's new paper is from his undergraduate research on RNA design and appeared in Nature Communications with him as sole first author. The work introduces a new method for finding nucleotide sequences that fold into a target secondary structure. 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. Steve Gazal published a paper, “Evaluating genetic ancestry inference from single-cell transcriptomic datasets” in HGG Advances. Please read the paper 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.

Drug Discovery Workshop

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.

Upcoming Events

March 5th (RRI 101 @ 2 pm): Seminar by Dr. Bill Noble, University of Washington

March 12th (RRI 101 @ 2 pm): Seminar by Dr. Dan Needleman, Harvard University

March 26th (RRI 101 @ 2 pm): Seminar by Dr. Olga Dudko, UC San Diego

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

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