Dottie’s Experience
My name is Dottie Yu and I am an undergraduate student in the Quantitative Biology BS program at USC. I am very glad to have attended the 2022 QCB Symposium at USC and present a poster of our project, “Rigorous Benchmarking of HLA Callers for RNA Seq Data.”
I had a fantastic experience at this conference and hope to be back in future years! Katie and all of the other organizers were incredibly warm and welcoming to me and the conference was well organized. I enjoyed the talks - they come from so many diverse fields of computational biology, many of which I rarely get to hear about. In particular, I enjoyed hearing about the computational simulation and prediction projects - it’s very different from the work we do in the Mangul Lab, but sounds very novel and exciting. The conference also allowed me to see how my project in the Mangul Lab fits in with the research being done by other labs, and it was encouraging to hear others recognize and use the HLA callers that my group is benchmarking, validating the usefulness of our work.
I am also so surprised and honored to have been awarded the QCB Google Alumni Award at the banquet! Thank you to Dr. Rohs, Katie, and everyone else in the faculty selection group for recognizing my work. I am so excited to continue engaging with the QCB department and field.
Cecilia’s Experience
Hi, I am Fangyun(Cecilia) Liu and I am a rising senior undergraduate student who is also majoring in Quantitative Biology at USC. The 2022 QCB Symposium is my very first experience of attending a symposium in-person. It was an amazing opportunity for me to present our project “Robustness and reproducibility of computational genomics tools” to other scholars who shared the same passion with me in computational biology.
For the three days in QCB Symposium, I had been immersively learning and exchanging research experiences of computational biology.The atmosphere of QCB Symposium is very heart-warming as people celebrate professor Waterman’s 80’s birthday. All the invited speakers had been working in the field of computational biology for a long time. And their stories with professor Michael Waterman illustrated how computational biology started from the well-known Smith-Waterman algorithm and diversified into so many distinct fields like protein interaction prediction, single-cell analysis, and many other novel directions. One memorable moment is when others learned about a new research field from my poster. It was great to inspire others in this broad discipline. Many thanks to Dr. Rohs, Katie, Dr. Waterman, and other QCB faculties who made this great conference possible. And also thanks to Serghei who guided me in the Robustness project so that I could present our poster in the QCB Symposium.
