PhD student Anamarie Martinez-Turak has received the Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award (NRSA) Individual Predoctoral Fellowship (F31).  

This award from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) will provide support for Martinez-Turak to focus on her dissertation research. Her fellowship is titled “Linking signaling to gene expression with mechanistic modeling and machine learning.” 

“The F31 is a training fellowship, so it will help me continue developing expertise at the intersection of computational biology, machine learning, genomics and immunology,” she said. “It gives me the opportunity to pursue a project that brings together several different areas and allows me to work closely with mentors across fields.” 

The goal of her project is to combine information about how cells respond to different cytokine signals with information encoded in DNA to better predict gene expression. She will develop a machine learning model that integrates these two sources of information to better understand how cells distinguish between signals and determine which genes to activate.   

Martinez-Turak’s advisor is Rachel Gottschalk with co-mentorship from Maria Chikina and Jim Faeder. The project will take place over the remainder of Martinez-Turak’s computational biology PhD program. The team hopes to have a preprint completed by the end of this year.  

“I’m most looking forward to seeing what we can learn biologically from the model we develop and then connect our computational predictions back to experimental biology,” Martinez-Turak said.