QB3 Fellows

Current QB3 Fellows

QB3-UCSC Graduate Fellowship for Interdisciplinary Excellence

Professional photo of Calhoun in suite and tie

Jackson Calhoun

I have been a rotation student on the CB3 track for my fellowship year. I have been fortunate to work with the McKinnie and Lokey labs thus far. In the McKinnie Lab I probed the substrate preference and activity of a PLP-dependent enzyme. My work led to the discovery and understanding of interesting background epimerization that the enzyme performs, and also which amino acids it prefers to utilize for its unique beta-substitution. I learned new techniques in NMR-based assays and began work with LC-MS techniques, which both helped validate my results. In the Lokey Lab I have been developing a cyclic peptide library to be tested against RNA structures. I am learning Solid-Phase Synthesis (SPS) of peptides and peptoid structures. I hope to soon test the nearly 200,000 compound library against telomerase RNA (and mutated variants) along with other therapeutically relevant RNAs. In doing so I will be learning how to adapt an affinity column to our RNA-cyclic peptide(peptoid) system, and validate these results through a fluorescence based assay.

Student in t-shirt in front of Golden Gate Bridge

Helio Ramollari

This fellowship is supporting me in exploring different projects in the Applied Optics Group, Schmidt Lab and expanding my multidisciplinary research skills. Currently, I am focusing on the fabrication, characterization, and integration of nanophotonic and optofluidic devices with applications in biosensors.

Professional photo of Taylor Won

Taylor Won

I am doing rotations in the Fall and Winter quarters. In my first rotation, I worked in Dr. Benedict Paten’s lab to assess the performance of a genome assembly polish tool for the pangenome project. I’m doing my second rotation in Dr. Russell Corbett-Detig’s lab on developing a pipeline to generate a phylogeny tree for Candida auris, a fungal species with growing public health concerns. My research interests primarily lie in infectious disease and public health. As I continue my rotation and graduate studies, I want to build expertise in computational skills and become proficient in the field. As a scientist, I aspire to apply my biology and computer science knowledge to aid people with medical needs.

Alumni QB3 Fellows