UCLA Bioinformatics faculty member Sriram Sankaraman was among 126 scientists and scholars in the United States and Canada selected to receive 2017 Sloan Research Fellowship. The fellowships are awarded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to early-career scientists and scholars who are the “rising stars of the academic community” and who are “transforming their fields and opening up entirely new research horizons,” said Paul Joskow, president of the Sloan Foundation. Congratulations Dr. Sankararaman!

Read more about Dr. Sankararaman here:

Four UCLA faculty members selected for 2017 Sloan Fellowships

UCLA Bioinformatics faculty member Grace Xiao was recently awarded a prestigious grant from the National Human Genome Research Institute to expand the ENCyclopedia Of DNA Elements (ENCODE). Congratulations Dr. Xiao!

Read more about Dr. Xiao’s grant and research here:

Xiao wins grant to work on ENCODE project

UCLA Bioinformatics faculty member David Eisenberg’s research on disease-carrying mosquitoes was featured on the UCLA Newsroom website.

Read more about Dr. Eisenberg’s research here:

A promising step toward controlling Zika virus and dengue fever

UCLA Bioinformatics faculty member Daniel Geschwind’s research on schizophrenia was featured on the UCLA Newsroom website.

Read more about Dr. Geschwind’s research here:

Scientists find new genetic roots of schizophrenia

Bioinformatics faculty member Kathrin Plath was among the first cohort of 84 scientists selected as Faculty Scholars by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), the Simons Foundation, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Faculty Scholars are “early-career scientists who have great potential to make unique contributions to their field.” 

To be chosen as an HHMI Faculty Scholar, early-career investigators must have between four and 10  years of experience as faculty members and must have shown potential for significant research productivity and originality, as judged by their doctoral and postdoctoral work, results from their independent research program, and their future research plans. Through this program, the philanthropies will spend about $83 million over five years to support the first cohort of scientists selected to receive grants.

Kathrin Plath, Professor of Biological Chemistry, earned her doctorate degree in cell biology from Harvard Medical School and the Humboldt University Berlin, Germany, and did her post-doctoral training at the University of California, San Francisco, where she worked on the X-inactivation process in female mammalian cells. In 2003, Dr. Plath moved to the Whitehead Institute at MIT to gain expertise in stem cell biology, and she joined UCLA’s Biological Chemistry Department in March 2006. Her lab focuses on epigenetic changes that occur during differentiation of pluripotent cells or during reprogramming to pluripotency. Dr. Plath serves as on the board of directors of the International Society for Stem Cell Research, and has received NIH’s New Innovator Award.

Congratulations Dr. Plath!

Please refer to our Admissions Information page for detailed instructions about how to apply to our program for the 2017-2018 school year.

UCLA Bioinformatics faculty member Daniel Geschwind’s research on autism was featured on the UCLA Newsroom website.

Read more about Dr. Geschwind’s research here:

UCLA study links autism to changes in micro-RNAs