JTech awards 10 scholarships to attend Biological Data Science

We are pleased to announce the first group of scholarship awardees for the James Taylor Foundation's Junior Training and Educational Hotspot (JTech) program. JTech supports graduate students, post-docs and junior faculty working at the intersection of computational biology and data science. The first group of 10 awardees are graduate students presenting their work at the 2020 CSHL Biological Data Science conference. Awardees represent ten institutions and are presenting a wide range of research at the meeting:

• Emily Davis-Marcisak, Johns Hopkins University

  • Matrix factorization of single-cell RNA-sequencing identifies immune cell states that project across species, cancer type, and infectious disease

• Georgia Doing, Hogan Lab, Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth

  • De-noising autoencoder-derived gene expression signatures for Pseudomonas aeruginosa elucidate virulence-promoting characteristics of ex vivo sputum from persons with cystic fibrosis

• Kwame Forbes, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill

  • Integration of preprocessed single-cell datasets with bulk differential analysis results for DESeq2

• Yuhan Hao, New York Genome Center and New York University

  • Multi-modal representation and mapping of single-cell data

• Anoushka Joglekar, Weill Cornell Medicine

  • Cell type signatures of brain-region specific splicing in postnatal development

• John Lawson, Center for Public Health Genomics and Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Virginia

  • COCOA: coordinate covariation analysis to annotate epigenetic heterogeneity

• Jens Luebeck, Bioinformatics & Systems Biology, University of California, San Diego

  • AmpliconReconstructor integrates NGS and optical mapping to resolve the complex structures of focal amplifications

• David Twesigomwe, Sydney Brenner Institute for Molecular Bioscience, University of the Witwatersrand

  • CypGen: A Nextflow pipeline for calling star alleles in cytochrome P450 genes

• Loan Vulliard, Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology, Max Perutz Labs, University of Vienna

  • Understanding Chemical-Genetic Interactions: Morphological screen of combined perturbations

• Sumaira Zaman, University of Connecticut

  • EASEL: Efficient, Accurate, Scalable Eukaryotic modeLs for de novo Genome Annotation

In addition to covering conference registration, awardees will also be paired with senior researchers in the field prior to the conference. Awardees and mentors will meet before and during the conference to establish what we hope will become long term relationships.

About JTech

“The most important job of senior faculty is to mentor junior faculty and students.” These are the words that Professor James P. Taylor, the Ralph S. O’Connor Professor at the Departments of Biology and Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University said and lived by. This, he believed, was imperative to advance science, and in a way that facilitated diversity and inclusion. The mission of this foundation is to continue his legacy, through a multifaceted approach which will be unrolled across several stages.

Please consider making a donation to support James Taylor’s legacy.