Sumaira Zaman: JXTX Foundation and Unique Opportunities

The JXTX Foundation's first activity was to sponsor 10 graduate students to attend the 2020 Biological Data Science Conference at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Awards were competitive and we were delighted with our first round of participants.

Sumaira Zaman, a scholarship awardee and graduate student at the University of Connecticut summarized her experience:

First of all I really want to thank and recognize the JXTX Scholarship organizers for putting together this initiative. This scholarship is just the beginning of James Taylor's legacy.

From a pool of extraordinary applicants, I am honored that the organizers chose to support me throughout the 2020 CSHL Biological Data Science Meeting not only financially but also professionally. The conference was excellent, hosting a diverse set of speakers and broadening my understanding of what biological data science entails. Given this conference was virtual, networking opportunities were not so straight forward. However, as JXTX awardees, we had the unique opportunity of personally speaking with principal investigators from a wide range of research. Some mentors even encouraged staying in touch, which was an incredibly kind sentiment especially for a graduate student. I mainly discussed my research with these mentors; their feedback and suggestions are invaluable and really gave me assurance in my research abilities. The conference provided me with exactly what I was looking for, application of algorithms and machine learning techniques to novel biological settings. But the scholarship gave me an opportunity that I otherwise would not have had. The opportunity to discuss my research confidently with experts in the field and for that I am so grateful.

Please help further the careers of junior researchers by making a contribution to JXTX: The James P. Taylor Foundation for Open Science.