Institute for Quantitative Biomedicine (IQB)

Congratulations to Dr. Sijian Wang

Please join us in congratulating Dr. Sijian Wang on his promotion from Associate Professor to Professor in the Department of Statistics. Sijian started his independent career at the University of Wisconsin, being promoted to Associate Professor in 2014 and joining Rutgers University as an Associate Professor in 2017. His research interests include: High-dimensional data analysis and big data analytics; Statistical learning and machine learning; Proteomics, bioinformatics, statistical genomics and precision medicine; Survival analysis and longitudinal data analysis; Statistical modeling and statistical practice. He is currently the Co-director for the Masters Program in Financial Statistics and Risk Management and the Masters Program in Data Science. We look forward to seeing Dr. Wang succeed in his new role.

IQB would like to congratulate Anders Laursen, CEO and Karin Calvinho, CTO of RenewCO2, for being named Innovator Fellow in the second cohort of Breakthrough Energy Fellows Global Program!

This past fall, Breakthrough Energy officially welcomed a second cohort of Breakthrough Energy Fellows (BE Fellows) to its global program designed to support the development of cutting-edge climate technologies. With the addition of these new Fellows, the program now includes a total of 62 leaders working on nearly 30 breakthrough technologies that have the potential to significantly reduce and abate greenhouse gas emissions. BE Fellows is a signature program of Breakthrough Energy, which provides innovators from across the globe with funding, mentorship, education, and access to the Breakthrough Energy network to support their climate technologies on the path from early development to widespread deployment. The program includes a total of 49 Innovator Fellows and 13 Business Fellows who provide counsel to help bring these technologies to market. The second cohort consists of Innovator and Business Fellows working on carbon capture, storage, and sequestration; cement; electrofuels; food and agriculture; hydrogen; long duration storage; and steel projects. The program also includes projects in biofuels, water treatment, HVAC systems, light weighting, and renewables. All Fellows were selected through a competitive application process and rigorous technical evaluation and must demonstrate and model an ability to reduce 500 million tons of carbon dioxide per year at scale. Experts agree that the only way to avoid the worst impacts of climate change is to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions from 51 billion tons a year to net zero. The world needs unprecedented technological transformation in almost every sector of modern life to achieve this goal, but today’s startup ecosystem is not designed to support climate innovators with the scale and urgency required. The BE Fellows program is helping to bridge that gap. “Our second cohort of Breakthrough Energy Fellows represents a group of brilliant, global innovators and climate thought leaders, all sharing a deep-rooted commitment toward finding innovative solutions to solve the climate crisis. These incredible individuals are working every day to introduce novel technologies and disruptive approaches to a variety of industries that will have the power to reimagine our sustainable future,” said Ashley Grosh, Vice President of Breakthrough Energy Fellows Program. “To succeed, these leaders need a uniquely tailored set of resources, and that’s why we created the Fellows program. We are very excited to welcome this remarkable group into our second cohort and support them as they take on our most pressing clean technology challenges.” Additional information about this can be found at the webpage below:

https://breakthroughenergy.org/news/breakthrough-energy-expands-its-global-fellowship-program

Congratulations Dr. Anders Laursen, Dr. Karin Calvinho, and RenewCO2!

Congratulations to Dr. Darrin M. York on receiving a competitive continuation which will cover the 23rd-26th year of continuous NIH R01 funding for this project and will total $1,387,316 over 4 years.

Please join me in congratulating Dr. Darrin M. York and his team on his continued innovations which have enabled 4 additional years of funding from the NIH. The current title of this award is: ‘Computational Enzymology to Study Diverse Catalytic Strategies of RNA.’

Narrative:

RNA enzymes are fundamental in biology, and have important applications for chemistry, biotechnology and medicine. The goal of this proposal is to develop and apply a novel computational RNA enzymology approach to gain a predictive understanding of the diverse array of catalytic strategies exhibited by RNA enzymes. Powerful computational tools and insightful guiding principles for ribozyme engineering are likely to emerge that enable the design of new biomedical technology and therapeutics.

Congratulations to Dr. Tai-Sung Lee on receiving an NIH R01 award totaling $1,256,000 over 4 years.

Please join me in congratulating Dr. Tai-Sung Lee in being awarded a new R01 award from the NIH. Dr. Lee is the PI of the award titled 'A next-generation extendable simulation environment for affordable, accurate, and efficient free energy simulations.'

Narrative:

In the field of molecular simulations, a new generation of integrated methods, workflows, and physical models are emerging, which leads to a critical barrier to progress in the field is the lack of a software package with seamless incorporation of existing software modules with emerging scientific advances. To surmount this barrier and in responding to NIH Focused Technology Funding Opportunity which calls for innovative, focused technology development of a working prototype of critical research tools, we propose to develop a next-generation executing environment for simulations. The proposed work will offer fast prototyping, accessibility to new algorithms, further improvements in single-GPU performance, strong scaling in synchronous and asynchronous ensemble methods, and interoperability with different types of force fields and physical models.

Rutgers Cryo-EM & Nanoimaging Facility creates Cryo-EM Federated Instrument Pilot Project, allowing for remote scientific control

The Ecosystem for Research Networking (ERN) has unveiled a new computing infrastructure project for shared scientific equipment, gathering efforts from Rutgers University, MGHPCC, Omnibond, Virginia Tech, UMass Amherst, Penn State University, and Pegasus. Its primary objective is to enhance the availability of expensive, specialized equipment to support national research endeavors. This initiative creates a remote portal to Cryo-EM operations and analysis, removing cost and geographical limitations, and thus increasing access to Cryo-EM equipment for researchers nationwide. The Rutgers Cryo-EM & Nanoimaging Facility is the beta test site for the remote portal and its director, Dr. Jason Kaelber, is the cryo-EM technical expert for the project.

The Cryo-EM Federated Instrument Pilot Project allows for data to be processed in real time using a closed-loop system between remote operator, instrument, and off-site HPC cluster. Crucially, researchers can modify settings immediately based on the ongoing real-time analysis, resulting in more accurate data extraction and increased efficiency. The team has chosen Open OnDemand for remote HPC computing because of its popularity, security, and flexibility and anticipates the research community will find the new portal easy to navigate, access, and customize.

“The idea of our closed-loop system is that as your experiment happens, the data analysis is happening simultaneously so that you can change any settings that you need to on the spot,” Dr. Kaelber states. “We are leveraging Open OnDemand in the context of this portal to create a workflow and user experience where every user can access all the tools they need.”

More information about the Cryo-EM Federated Instrument Pilot Project can be found here

Congratulations to Dr. Sang-Hyuk Lee

Please join us in congratulating Dr. Sang-Hyuk Lee on his promotion from Assistant Professor to Associate Professor with tenure in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. Since joining Rutgers in 2015, Sang-Hyuk has been establishing an interdisciplinary optics/biophysics lab. His research group uses advanced optical microscopy to study molecular and cellular processes in high spatiotemporal resolution, ultimately at the single-molecule level. A multimodal instrument that Sang-Hyuk has developed is one of a kind, and its application to biology in collaboration with biology groups on campus has lead to new discoveries in multiple fields such as plant cell wall biosynthesis and mitochondrial transcription. He secured DOE funding for bioimaging and recently contributed to the award from Keck Foundation for investigating quantum magnetism with vortex beams. We look forward to seeing Dr. Lee succeed in his new role.

Jennifer Jiang receiving the IQB inclusive leadership award

Graduate student Jennifer Jiang has been awarded the IQB Inclusive Leadership Award in recognition of her outstanding achievements. More information on the award and Jennifer's achievements can be found at https://iqb.rutgers.edu/inclusiveleadershipaward

IQB Spring 2023 Seminar Series Announced

IQB is excited to announce another great lineup for next semester's seminar series! Speaker and seminar information can be found at https://iqb.rutgers.edu/seminars

Congratulations to Dr. Lu Wang

Please join us in congratulating Dr. Lu Wang on her promotion from Assistant Professor to Associate Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology. Lu started her independent career at Rutgers University in January 2016. Her research group uses theoretical and computational tools to study chemical and biological systems in the condensed phase. In particular, her group has been designing theoretical methods to model the linear and multidimensional vibrational spectroscopy of nucleic acids, and implementing state-of-the-art first principles simulations to reveal the quantum nature of hydrogen bonds in proteins. We look forward to seeing Dr. Wang succeed in her new role.

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