We are thrilled to announce that James Zou has been promoted to DBDS Associate Professor with tenure. A hearty congratulations and thanks for his endless hard work, revolutionary research, and constant contributions to DBDS.
Go, James!
Julia Salzman’s new paper on Cell today:
Today’s genomics workflows typically require alignment to a reference sequence, which limits discovery. We introduce a unifying paradigm, SPLASH (Statistically Primary aLignment Agnostic Sequence Homing), which directly analyzes raw sequencing data, using a statistical test to detect a signature of regulation: sample-specific sequence variation. SPLASH detects many types of variation and can be efficiently run at scale. We show that SPLASH identifies complex mutation patterns in SARS-CoV-2, discovers regulated RNA isoforms at the single-cell level, detects the vast sequence diversity of adaptive immune receptors, and uncovers biology in non-model organisms undocumented in their reference genomes: geographic and seasonal variation and diatom association in eelgrass, an oceanic plant impacted by climate change, and tissue-specific transcripts in octopus. SPLASH is a unifying approach to genomic analysis that enables expansive discovery without metadata or references.
Welcome Oliver Ferydoon Azizi and congratulations to Roxana Daneshjou and family!
Oliver was a wee bit early, but he and Roxana are doing very well.
Mark Musen, Professor of Biomedical Data Science and Director of the Stanford Center for Biomedical Informatics Research, received the degree of Doctor honoris causa from the University of Fribourg (Switzerland) in a ceremony on November 15, 2023.
https://events.unifr.ch/dies/fr/programme/dies-academicus-2023.html