September 2025 QCB Newsletter

QCB at USC
Oct 2
5 min read

e-Newsletter Volume 5 Issue 6 | September 2025

Personal Remarks by Dr. Remo Rohs

The fall semester is in full swing. One of my favorite annual events is the Quantitative Biology (QBIO) Ice Cream Social, where we welcomed the QBIO freshmen and welcomed back all QBIO undergraduate students. This year's event was truly exciting, with many QBIO students and most QCB faculty and staff in attendance.

Due to the shared effort to maintain financial health of the university, the QCB faculty made the difficult decision to not have a departmental retreat this year. Our commitment remains to continue this important and always very successful event next year and in the future.

Enjoy the beautiful fall season, and Shana Tova to everyone who celebrates.

Remo Rohs, Ph.D.

Department Chair

QCB Faculty

QCB faculty Dr. Jazlyn Mooney was awarded a renewal of her endowed Gabilan Assistant Professorship in Quantitative and Computational Biology. This award was made by the Women in Science and Engineering (WiSE) program upon the QCB department's recommendation earlier this summer, even before her impressive recent achievements, of being awarded an early-stage-investigator NIH R35 MIRA grant and publishing a Cell paper as sole corresponding author, which was featured by a Dornsife press release. Congrats, Jazlyn!

QCB Distinguished Professor Dr. Helen Berman was awarded the Barnard College Medal of Distinction. This is Dr. Berman's Alma Mater's highest honor, and she received it at Barnard College's commencement ceremony at Radio City Music Hall earlier this summer (Photo credit Dr. Emily Liman). Congrats, Helen!

QCB faculty Dr. Naomi Levine was awarded a Distinguished Gabilan Professorship in Science and Engineering. This award is made by the Women in Science and Engineering (WiSE) Program "for excellence in academic accomplishments as well as contributions to the WiSE Program". Congrats, Naomi!

QCB faculty Dr. Stacey Finley received the 2025 Mid-Career Award from the Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES). The award “recognizes a member in good standing who has demonstrated significant leadership and achievements in biomedical engineering. These achievements may be in scholarship, education, mentorship, leadership, or the practice of biomedical engineering.” Dr. Finley will give an award lecture at the 2025 BMES Annual Meeting in San Diego Oct. 8 – 12, 2025. Congrats, Stacey!

QCB faculty Drs. Peter Calabrese and Tsu-Pei Chiu presented the QCB department's educational approaches and programs this summer at the ISMB/ECCB 2025, the primary annual conference of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB), in Liverpool, UK. Dr. Calabrese gave a presentation "Introduction of an innovative undergraduate curriculum in computational biology" and Dr. Chiu presented on "Modularizing AI education in bioinformatics: a framework for scalable and adaptive curriculum design".

QCB faculty Dr. Stacey Finley, as a contact PI, received a 5-year U01 award from the NIH Physical Sciences in Oncology Network (PS-ON). This is a collaboration with Dr. Evanthia Roussos Torres from the USC Keck School of Medicine. The project will investigate the tumor microenvironment of advanced breast tumors using multi-scale computational modeling of the tumor immune ecosystem combined with quantitative tumor profiling to guide the development of strategies to improve immunotherapy.

QCB faculty Dr. Stacey Finley, as a co-PI, received an award from the USC Ming Hsieh Institute with Dr. Henz-Josef Lenz from the USC Keck School of Medicine. The project will study how inhibition of the metabolism of fluoropyrimidines (which are used as chemotherapy drugs) enhances immunotherapy efficacy in metastatic colorectal cancer.

QCB joint faculty Paul Thompson of the Keck School of Medicine has been selected as the recipient of the 2025 Gold Medal Award from the Society of Biological Psychiatry (SOBP). This prestigious honor recognizes individuals whose groundbreaking work has significantly advanced the field of biological psychiatry. Congrats, Paul!

QCB joint faculty Dr. Cornelius Gati, Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences, and Dr. Kate White, Gabilan Assistant Professor of Chemistry, will embark on exciting new opportunities later this fall. Dr. Gati accepted a faculty position at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School. Dr. White will be a director in quantitative cell imaging at the Allen Institute of Cell Science. Congratulations, Kate and Cornelius!

QCB Publications

Former QCB postdoc Maria Akopyan and QBIO undergraduate student Matthew Genchev, both from Dr. Jazlyn Mooney's lab, published a study titled “Reference genome choice compromises population genetic analyses” in Cell. The authors quantify how using a reference genome from a different species affects commonly used statistics for conservation and inferences in population genetics. They found that using a different species as the reference will produce biased results that could lead to population mismanagement, which is very important in species of conservation concern. You can read the paper here, and Dornsife news article on it here.

CBB graduate students George Wang and Yibei Jiang, as co-first authors from Dr. Remo Rohs’s lab, with contributions from Dr. Oscar Aparicio's and Dr. Vadim Cherezov's groups, published a paper titled “Novel fold and wing structure of Forkhead transcription factor facilitate DNA binding” in Nucleic Acids Research. The study reveals a novel protein fold with base-specific interactions in the DNA minor groove. Molecular dynamics simulations related Fkh1 function to conformational flexibility of protein wing residues. Please read the paper here. The coordinates of the new structure were deposited in the Protein Data Bank under PDB accession code 9EFW.

QCB faculty Dr. Liang Chen and her student Zheyu Li from Chemical Engineering published a paper titled “Dissecting the genetic architecture of circadian rhythms in human tissues using a quantitative circadian deviation score” in Genome Biology. The study analyzed the genetic component of circadian rhythms via novel molecular QTL mapping, identifying new potentially druggable targets for sleep disorders. Please find the paper here.

QCB joint faculty Dr. Christoph Haselwandter published a paper titled “The density of Braun's Lipoprotein determines vesicle production in E. coli” in PLoS One. Please read the paper here.

CBB Graduate Students

October 3rd (RRI 101 @ 2 pm): Dissertation Defense by Yibei Jiang (Rohs Lab)

November 3rd (RRI 101 @ 2 pm): Dissertation Defense by George Wang (Rohs Lab)

QBIO Undergraduate Students

Trojan Family Weekend, November 7th (RRI 101 @ 2 pm): Quantitative Biology (QBIO) major opens doors to medical school, graduate school, and industry

Upcoming Events

October 2nd (RRI 101 @ 2pm): Tenure talk by Dr. Doc Edge

October 9th (RRI 101 @ 2pm): Tenure talk by Dr. Adam MacLean

October 16th (RRI 101 @ 2pm): Seminar by Dr. Brian Browning, University of Washington

October 23rd (RRI 101 @ 2pm): Seminar by Dr. Melissa Gymrek, UCSD

October 30th (RRI 101 @ 2pm): Seminar by Dr. John Wakeley, Harvard University

Our mailing address is:

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