Department News
Benjamin Kellman: Biking for Science
February 16, 2017Benjamin Kellman, a Ph.D. student in Bioinformatics and Systems Biology, is biking along the California Pacific Coast to fundraise for the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Ruth Williams Wins Major Math Prize
November 17, 2016Professor Ruth Williams in the Department of Mathematics has been awarded the 2016 John von Neumann Theory Prize, one of the most prestigious awards in mathematics.
Olga Botvinnik and Gabriel Pratt awarded 2016 ARCS award
November 10, 2016Bioinformatics & Systems Biology graduate students Olga Botvinnik and Gabriel Pratt have each been awarded an ARCS Fellowship.
Rachel Marty awarded NSF GROW Fellowship
July 20, 2016Rachel Marty has been awarded an NSF GROW fellowship to conduct research in cancer immunology at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. The project entails computationally categorizing immune regions of the genome, such as HLA and KIR, and deciphering their roles in cancer. The NSF GROW (Graduate Resarch Opportunities Worldwide) Fellowship provides opportunities for students to engage in international research collaborations abroad. Rachel Marty received a B.S. in Computer Science with a specialization in Bioinformatics at UCSD and is currently in the Ph.D. program in Bioinformatics and Systems Biology at UCSD.
Olga Botvinnik
May 25, 2016Olga Botvinnik, a Ph.D. student in the Bioinformatics and Systems Biology graduate program, is featured in a story about women in the open source software community.
NSF Graduate Research Fellowships awarded to Rachel Marty
June 19, 2015The National Science Foundation has awarded Graduate Research Fellowships to Ph.D. student Rachel Marty in the graduate Bioinformatics and Systems Biology program and to Max Shen in the undergraduate Bioinformatics program.
Trey Ideker named AAAS Fellow
November 26, 2014Trey Ideker has been selected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Olga Botvinnik awarded 2014 John Hunter Technology Fellowship
July 7, 2014Olga Botvinnik, a Ph.D. student in the Bioinformatics and Systems Biology graduate program, has been awarded the 2014 John Hunter Fellowship. The focus of her Fellowship will be to create open source analysis software for the single-cell and biology communities, and to pioneer data, code sharing, and computational reproducibility within the single-cell and RNA biology communities.
NSF Graduate Research Fellowships awarded to Leen Jamal and Jeffrey Yuan
April 1, 2014The National Science Foundation has awarded Graduate Research Fellowships to Ph.D. students Leen Jamal and Jeffrey Yuan in the graduate Bioinformatics and Systems Biology program, and to students Robin Betz and Christopher Probert in the undergraduate Bioinformatics program.
Simple Math Sheds New Light on a Long-Studied Biological Process
August 7, 2013One of the most basic and intensively studied processes in biology—one which has been detailed in biology textbooks for decades—has gained a new level of understanding, thanks to the application of simple math to a problem that scientists never before thought could benefit from mathematics.
The scientists who made the discovery, published in this week's advance online publication of Nature, found that the process bacteria use to quickly adapt to metabolize preferred energy sources such as glucose—a process called “catabolite repression”—is controlled not just by glucose, as had long been known and taught, but just as much by other essential nutrients, such as nitrogen and sulfur, available to bacteria in their growth medium.
“This is one of the most studied processes in molecular biology; it’s in every textbook,” says Terence Hwa, a professor of physics and biology at UC San Diego, who headed the team of scientists. “We showed that this process doesn’t work the way most people thought it did for the past several decades, and its purpose is different from what had generally been assumed.”