May 2026 QCB Newsletter

e-Newsletter Volume 6 Issue 4 | May 2026

Personal Remarks by Dr. Remo Rohs

This newsletter is long because it was an eventful month. Three QCB faculty members were promoted. Several QCB faculty members and many CBB and QBIO students received awards. And the Class of 2026 graduated. Congratulations to all!

There is lots to look forward to. Computing and AI in biology have never been more important. Student interest in QCB continues to grow. And we received curricular approval of our Dornsife intensive ‘AI for Molecular Biology’ which we will start teaching this Fall.

Now is the time for conferences and vacation. Have a great and productive summer!

Remo Rohs, Ph.D.

Department Chair

QCB Faculty

Dr. Doc Edge was promoted to Associate Professor with Tenure.  Congratulations, Doc!

Dr. Adam MacLean was promoted to Associate Professor with Tenure.  Congratulations, Adam!

Dr. Pete Calabrese was promoted to Full Professor of Teaching. Congratulations, Pete!

The QCB Department held a reception celebrating the promotions of Drs. Edge, MacLean, and Calabrese. We thank our staff Maribeth Hernandez and Ian Kayaian for making this a memorable event with three delicious cakes!

QCB faculty Dr. Seva Katritch received an R01 grant from the National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Stroke titled “Structure-guided discovery of positive allosteric modulators for the D2 dopamine receptor”.  In this multiple PI project, led by Dr. Daniel Rosenbaum at UT Southwestern Medical Center, Dr. Katritch’s lab will be responsible for computer-guided screening and optimization of new treatments for Parkinson's disease that avoid the side effects of standard drugs.

QCB faculty Dr. Liang Chen received a major R01 grant from the National Cancer Institute to support her work on Nonsense-mediated mRNA decay (NMD) regulation in cancers. The project will help to guide the development of personalized cancer therapies, leveraging NMD's intricate mechanisms as a crucial post-transcriptional regulator. Congratulations, Liang!

QCB faculty Drs. Peter Calabrese, Doc Edge, and Remo Rohs received faculty awards from Dean James Bullock at the Dornsife Awards Luncheon. Dr. Calabrese received an Inaugural Dornsife Teaching Award, and Drs. Edge and Rohs received Albert S. Raubenheimer Awards for junior and senior faculty, respectively. Read more about all awardees here.

Dr. Michael Waterman was the commencement speaker of the Statistics Department at UC Berkeley. You can watch the Berkeley graduation and listen to Dr. Waterman's inspiring speech here.

QCB Graduation

The QCB Department celebrated this year's graduation with our undergraduate, Master's, and PhD graduates with a reception in the USC Village at the corner of Jefferson Blvd. and Hoover St. We want to thank our faculty for participating and our staff, Dr. Rokas Oginskis, Dominique Andrade, and Luigi Manna, for organizing our get together with our graduates and their families.

The QCB Department honored four CBB PhD graduates with this year's Michael S. Waterman Award for PhD students in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics. The Waterman Award winners are Xinyu (Brian) Guo, Dr. Yibei Jiang, Dr. Paulina Smaruj, and Dr. Qingyang Yin. Congrats!

The QCB Department honored QBIO Master's graduate Joshua Gabbay with this year's Michael S. Waterman Award for Masters students in Quantitative and Computational Biology. Congrats!

The QCB Department honored QBIO graduate Karen Lee with this year's John Petruska Memorial Award for her academic achievements and contributions to the department. Congrats!

The QCB Department awarded three QCB Excellence in Teaching Awards to Feriel Ouerghi, Dr. Yingfei Wang, and Yuqiu "Rachel" Wang. Congrats!

The QBIO Department awarded the USC QCB Alumni Google Award this year to 10 graduating QBIO students due to the academic strength of this graduating class. The Google Award winners are Sean Cheng, Daniel Choi, Matthew Genchev, Erika Weichin Li, Kailin Liu, (bottom row from left to right) Kate Olsen, Connor Qiu, Jeanne Michelle Revilla, Melody Yahzdi, and Lucia R. Zhang. Congrats!

QCB Publications

QCB faculty Dr. Edge's lab published a new paper, "Observational epidemiological studies can mitigate genetic confounding with a genetic relatedness matrix" in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The paper shows that the standard method of adjusting for genetic confounding in epidemiology and related fields performs poorly, and provides a practical solution using genetic relatedness matrices. Former Edge Lab postdoc (and current faculty member at the University of Oregon) Dr. Roshni Patel led the work, with contributions from QCB research scientist Josh Schraiber and former QCB faculty Matt Pennell. Please read the paper here.

QCB faculty Dr. Steve Kay published a review In Nature Genetics Reviews entitled "Time matters: circadian genetics and the molecular logic of human health and disease". Circadian networks are increasingly implicated in regulating a broad array of homeostatic processes, and this comprehensive review discusses the implications of these networks in multiple organ systems and their cognate disease states.  Please read the paper here.

QCB PhD student Yongchan Hong, CS PhD student Ao Xu, and former QCB postdoc Dr. Jordy Lam, all from Dr. Seva Katritch’s lab, published a paper titled “PLATE-VS: a web server for protein–ligand assay curation and cross-target virtual screening datasets” in the Nucleic Acids Research webserver issue. The server provides a variety of customizable benchmark sets and splits for training and testing ligand binding prediction methods. Please read the paper here.

QCB postdoc Dr. My Nguyen from Dr. Katritch’s lab published a paper titled “Molecular mechanisms for subtype selectivity of kinin receptors' antagonists” in Nature Communications. Dr. Nguyen performed computational modeling and analysis of drugs acting at Bradykinin receptors, in close collaboration with structural biologists and biochemists from the USC lab of Dr. Vadim Cherezov and  Dr. Haitao Zhang (Zhejiang University). Please read the paper here.

QCB joint faculty Dr. Andrei Irimia published a paper titled “Deep survival modeling to predict future cognitive impairment in unimpaired adults” in J Gerontology. Please read the paper here: here.

CBB PhD Students

Two PhD students from Dr. Liang Chen’s lab recently graduated or are planning to graduate: Dr. Qingyang Yin has graduated and will be joining Uber, and Xinyu Guo plans to defend his dissertation in August before going to Yale for a postdoctoral position.

CBB PhD graduate Dr. Paulina Smaruj defended her dissertation "From interpretation to design: Deep Learningapproaches to mammalian genome folding" advised by QCB faculty Dr. Geoffrey Fudenberg. Paulina is the first student to graduate from the Fudenberg lab. During her time at QCB, she served for one year as President of the CBB Graduate Student Association and contributed much to the department.

QCB Undergraduates

QBIO alum, Brandon Ye, had his white coat ceremony at Johns Hopkins University where he started Medical School. Brandon won a Barry Goldwater Scholarship and last year's Michael S. Waterman Award.

The QBIO 490 Directed Research class ended with another successful presentation by the class participants. The final projects that were co-advised by QBIO Seniors Erika Li, Jeanne Revilla, and QCB joint faculty member Dr. Jerry Lee of the Elison Medical Institute. The QCB Department thanks Jerry, Erika, Jeanne, and all other co-teaching students for running this course.

QCB Staff

The QCB Department wished Farewell to our beloved custodian for more than 21 years, Ms. Alicia Monterroso. Alicia is retiring from her service and will return to her home country to take care of her family. Alicia was very much the spirit of our building, greeting everyone with a bright smile each morning. We already miss her dearly and want to thank her for her work and commitment over these many years.

Our QBIO undergraduate academic advisor, Jasmin Gonzalez, was excited to meet the Dornsife commencement speaker, Dr. Dexter Holland from The Offspring, whom she is a huge fan of. Dexter supports the Dornsife educational mission through the Professor Bob Baker Memorial Award established by him in 2024 following the QCB chair's suggestion. Read here about the award. 

Our QCB/Life Science Hub staff members Maribeth Hernandez (top middle), Ian Kayaian, Luigi Manna, Dominique Andrade, and Dr. Rokas Oginskis made several memorable events this month possible. Maribeth and Ian organized a fantastic QCB faculty promotion party, Dominique and Rokas organized the QCB graduation reception, and Luigi took a few hundred photos at PhD hooding and QCB graduation. Thank you all for your exceptional service!

QCB Advisory Board

QCB advisory board member Dr. Bin Yu from UC Berkeley was interviewed about teaching veridical data science. The interview can be found here. Dr. Yu previously published a book "Veridical Data Science: The Practice of Responsible Data Analysis and Decision Making" which can be accessed here.

Events

Events for the Fall semester will be announced in a summer newsletter. As QCB Newsletter Team (Kathlyn Pham, Karen Lee, Seva Katritch, and Remo Rohs), we wish everyone a wonderful and productive summer.

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