e-Newsletter Volume 4 Issue 5 | May 2024
Personal Remarks by Dr. Remo Rohs
The May Newsletter is devoted to commencement, graduation, and Ph.D. hooding of our students. I congratulate once again all graduates of our QCB Department, many of them featured on our departmental website, the Ph.D. Program Graduates and the QBIO Undergraduate Major Graduates. Congratulations to you and your families!
This was certainly another unusual graduation day. Our departmental reception was moved to a beautiful place on campus and it was likely the best event we ever had. I want to thank Dornsife Events and Brenda Mendoza for making this possible. Huge thanks to our departmental staff for countless hours towards this effort, Rokas, Tanya, Luigi, and Chelsea, and to all our student volunteers.
Part of our QCB graduation ceremony are departmental commencement speeches. Our speakers this year were Dr. Soheil Shams (speech available here), a USC graduate, founder of BioDiscovery, former CIO of Bionano Genomics, and founder of TESA Research, and Dr. Michael Waterman (speech available here), University Professor Emeritus and founder of the field of computational biology.
With this Newsletter, I want to also say goodbye to Dean Amber Miller. Under Amber’s leadership and with her recommendation, the QBIO major was established, and QCB became first a Section and then a Department. Thanks for trusting in us and giving us this opportunity.
Remo Rohs, Ph.D.
Department Chair
QCB PhD Hooding
Dornslife Graduation
QBIO Graduation Reception
QCB Commencement Speeches
QCB Department Awards (2023-2024)
2023-2024 Recipients of the Michael S. Waterman Award in Quantitative and Computational Biology (left to right):
Ho Ming (Jordy) Lam (Mentor: Professor Vsevolod Katritch)
Raktim Mitra (Mentor: Professor Remo Rohs)
Yuxuan Du (Mentor: Professor Fengzhu Sun)
2023-2024 Recipients of the QCB Award for Excellence in Teaching in Quantitative and Computational Biology (left to right):
Dallace Francis (Mentor: Professor Fengzhu Sun)
Yibei Jiang (Mentor: Professor Remo Rohs)
2023-2024 Recipient of the John Petruska Memorial Award in Quantitative Biology:
Nicole Black, QBIO
2023-2024 Recipients of the USC QCB Google Alumni Award in Quantitative Biology (counterclockwise from top):
Wade Boohar, Jordan L. Cahoon, Brandon Ye, Karen Lee (not pictured: Andrew Wilk)
To view the full collection of photos from our graduate and undergraduate events, please navigate to these links: Ph.D. Hooding Ceremony May 8, 2024 & Dornsife Graduation Ceremony/QCB Department Reception May 10, 2024.
A huge thanks also to our photographer Jodye Alcon and her assistant, and to our DJ Andrew Langsam and his assistant from Get in the Groove Entertainment.
Additional huge thanks to Madison and Justin Eick from Design By T.E.G. for the QCB and Graduation webpages, and to Colin Yeo for help with the Newsletter.
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Our mailing address is:
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