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UCLA Computational Medicine and Statistics professor Jingyi Jessica Li won one of the 2023 COPSS Emerging Leader Awards. The award recognizes the talents, leadership potential, and achievements of high-potential early career statistical scientists. 

The Overton Prize recognizes the research, education, and service accomplishments of early to mid-career scientists who are emerging leaders in computational biology and bioinformatics. The Overton Prize was instituted in 2001 to honor the untimely loss of G. Christian Overton, a leading bioinformatics researcher and a founding member of the ISCB Board of Directors.

Computational Medicine continues to expand its faculty by recruiting professors with primary appointments in other departments and recent PhDs as Assistant Adjunct Professors. The new faculty complement the research of our current faculty and students and contribute to the community by serving on committees and participating in CGSI and other activities. Their affiliation with Comp Med also supports collaboration across disciplines, departments, and schools.

David Sampson | dsampson@mednet.ucla.edu

UCLA researchers have developed an “all-in-one,” next-generation statistical simulator capable of assimilating a wide range of information to generate realistic synthetic data and provide a benchmarking tool for medical and biological researchers who use advanced technologies to study diseases and potential therapies. Specifically, the new computer-modeling – or “in silico” – system can help researchers evaluate and validate computational methods.

David Sampson | DSampson@mednet.ucla.edu

Polygenic scores – estimates of an individual’s predisposition for complex traits and diseases – hold promise for identifying patients at risk of disease and guiding early, personalized treatments, but UCLA experts found the scores fail to account for the wide range of genetic diversity across individuals in all ancestries.

A new study of UCLA Health’s large genetic biobank is giving researchers new insights into the disease risks faced by the region’s diverse communities and their access to health care. The effort, published in Nature Medicine, may prove useful in developing personalized medicine and treatment approaches to groups often overlooked by the medical system.

UCLA Computational Medicine and Statistics professor Jingyi Jessica Li won one of the 2023 COPSS Emerging Leader Awards. The award recognizes the talents, leadership potential, and achievements of high-potential early career statistical scientists. 

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) are an important tool for disease mapping but are under-explored for populations of individuals with mixed genetic ancestries (admixed). This work provides guidance on method selection and shows that differences in allele frequency and/or causal effects by ancestries impact statistical power for GWAS in admixed populations.

UCLA Samueli Newsroom

Recent scientific discoveries have shown that Neanderthal genes comprise some 1 to 4% of the genome of modern non-Africans, but the question remained open on how much those genes are still actively influencing human traits — until now.

Recent Biomathematics Ph.D. graduate Alexander Fisher (now an Assistant Professor at Duke) has received the Publisher's Award for Excellence in Systematic Research from The Society of Systematic Biologists. The award is presented to the two best papers based on student research published in Systematic Biology during the previous year.

The award is for the research article: 
Alexander A Fisher, University of California, Los Angeles