Anne-Ruxandra Carvunis has been promoted to Associate Professor with tenure.

Anne has been very productive since joining DCSB in the tenure stream in 2017. In a few years, she assembled a team of computational and experimental scientists and has published many high-impact articles. The promise of her innovative research program has been recognized by the Searle Scholar award, the LHAS Trailblazer award, the NIH Director’s New Innovator award and a Sloan Research Fellowship.

In addition to excelling in research, Anne has taken on leadership roles at the University of Pittsburgh and beyond. She co-founded the Pittsburgh Center for Evolutionary Biology and Medicine (CEBaM) and became co-organizer of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories international meeting on Network Biology. Her work has inspired the creation of a new start-up by Flagship Pioneering (the creators of Moderna), as well as a new annotation effort by Ensembl to delineate the “non-canonical” translated genetic elements of the human genome. A leader in education as well, she is the Associate Director of our Integrative Systems Biology PhD program.

Congratulations to Anne-Ruxandra Carvunis!

Guo and Lee use computational and synthetic biology approaches to develop a new method called SunRISER for visualizing single mRNA molecules in living cells. By observing cells over timescales of a full day, they show that environmental stresses lead to heterogeneity between genetically identical sister cells through asymmetric mitotic mRNA inheritance. They argue that asymmetric inheritance can rapidly diversify individuals among cancer cell populations leading to robustness against harsh and nutrient-limited environments.

SunRISER on the cover of Cell Reports Methods

Guo Y, Lee REC (2022) Long-term imaging of individual mRNA molecules in living cells. Cell Reports Methods. 100226

Dr. Weikang Wang, a former postdoctoral researcher in the Xing lab, will assume an independent tenure-track researcher position (equivalent to an assistant professor) at Institute of Theoretical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences in May, 2022. Congratulations!

The CPCB GSA held their first annual 24-hour CPCB Hackathon from 5pm April 8th to 5pm April 9th. The event included meals and prizes awarded by a judging panel: Maria Chikina, Olexandr Isayev, and Phillip Compeau. Participants will also receive an exclusive CPCB mousepad, courtesy of Prof. David Koes.

The purpose of hosting this hackathon was to promote collaboration and knowledge sharing between all specialties and interests. With that in mind, all projects were valid: a group of students could make a compbio quilt, an API that starts the coffee machine or orders Chipotle, a CLI for transcriptomics workflows, or a protein that folds up to look like a professor.

Winners of the CPCB Hackathon 2022 were:

Logo-Gen: A Web-app for Generating new CPCB Logos with Biological Modeling — Participants’ favorite (2/2), 1st place
by Anush Devadhasan, Shahul Alam, and Caleb Ellington

Optimal Causal single-cEll ANalysis Cells (OCEANCells) — 2nd place
by Frank Zhang, Minxue Jia, Jason Doi, and Devin Jiang

The Mysterious Affair at Murdoch: a Paper-Stealing Puzzle Game — Participants’ favorite (1/2), 3rd place
by Roshni Bhatt, Marissa Di

Other Projects:

One Shining Moment of 2020: Using analytics and neural networks to crown an NCAA men’s basketball champion
by Alex Hummels

CPCB Codenames: A New Take on a Classic Game, presented as a customized desktop app
by Sophia Hu