NEWS

	Stanford approaches!	Wednesday, September 6, 2006
	I have begun my blog for Stanford (I am participating in the School of Medicine which was featured in US News). It is a much more casual format and includes more intimate details on life. I'm also registering for classes. Currently I'm planning on taking a Biomedical Informatics course, a Statistics course and a Computer Science course. I'm also setting up meetings with potential rotations including Serafim Batzoglou, Atul Butte, Arend Sidow and Daphne Koller.
Links: ♦ Stanford Blog ♦ Serafim Batzoglou ♦ Atul Butte ♦ Daphne Koller ♦ Arend Sidow

	SoCalBSI/Caltech 2006	Friday, May 19, 2006
	I have completed my summer program at SoCalBSI, finishing up my work on the greedy motif finder created for the motif finding software package Cistematic. I am currently in the process of writing up cisGreedy (and other packages I added to the tool). The final presentation is available on my website, which includes some performance results. There are other impressive presentations available on the SoCalBSI website as well. As an additonal programming project required by the program, I created a sequence evolution program. It was intended to model mutations in randomly created sequences, with the ability to track the creation and destruction of motifs defined by the user.
Links: ♦ cisGreedy presentation ♦ SoCalBSI presentation ♦ Sequence Evolution presentation

	Summer plans	Friday, May 19, 2006
	Volume 9, Issue 1 of the ISCB (International Society for Computational Biology) Newsletter features a section on conferences which included a feature on the 10th annual RECOMB conference. Included in this short report is a mention of Eleazar and my paper on the history of RECOMB, and the presentation given by Michal Linial of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (as both authors were unable to attend the Venice event). The website for next year's 11th annual RECOMB is already available, which will be held in the bay area this year, hosted by QB3 (the California Institute for Quantitative Biomedical Research-which includes UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz and UC San Francisco). ISCB has expressed interested in producing a similar presentation for their milestone conference being held next summer.
Links: ♦ ISCB Newsletter, Volume 9, Issue 1 ♦ RECOMB Anniversary Committee presentation ( PDF , Powerpoint ) ♦ International Society for Computational Biology ♦ 11th Annual International Conference on Research in Computational Molecular Biology

	Summer plans	Monday, May 8, 2006
	I have decided to rejoin SoCalBSI for the summer. I had been planning on working with the Wold lab over summer to fill in my free time, so it seemed ideal to once again go through the program, since I had enjoyed it so much the first time through. I'm excited to be able to design a project as well. In addition I am going to be traveling to Hawaii, Europe and Canada over the course of the next few months (per Eleazar's suggestion to have fun this summer), and moving to the bay area as well. I also emailed Mr. Paul, a Beverly Hills High School teacher, to thank him for his encouragement in Computer Science while I was in school. I feel it really moved me into the field. As it turns out the school is working on modifying their curriculum to possibly include CS in many courses. It's quite exciting. I was asked to speak at career day at the school, but nothing has been set.
Links: ♦ Southern California Bioinformatics Summer Institute(SoCalBSI) ♦ Beverly Hills High School

	I am published!	Monday, April 17, 2006
	My paper for RECOMB2006 on the history of the conference is now available online. While it isn't a scientific paper it is the first time I am listed as an author on a full-length paper. I should soon be listed on a second paper (this time scientific and published in a journal) as an author with the work I performed as an undergraduate with Ben Raphael and Brad Messmer at UCSD. In the future I may also be listed as an author for my work with Ali Mortazavi at Barbara Wold's lab at Caltech. In any case I am excited about my first paper.
Links: ♦ Electronic version of the paper ♦ List of my publications

	Graduate school decision!	Friday, April 14, 2006
	I have accepted the offer at Stanford's Biomedical Informatics PhD program. The world-class faculty, amazing resources, outstanding students and general feeling of the program turned out to be the perfect match for my graduate studies. I'm extremely excited. I was quite unsure about my choice all the way through, and many people told me to follow my gut, and that I would feel much better once I made my choice, but I felt I needed to be completely convinced before I accepted. I was down to the deadline and I was completely out of control in thinking that I would make the wrong choice and I would fail in having a successful career and contribute significantly to science. I realized I would find great research at all the institutions from which I had offers, and thought about where I was happiest with the personal interactions as well. I went with the place that made me happiest and as soon as I made my decision I immediately felt great, just as others had said. It's always hard to follow advice when you're in a certain position, but it always turns out to be the right advice.
Links: ♦ Stanford's BioMedical Informatics ♦ Stanford Graduate Fellowship

	New graduate school developments	Monday, March 20, 2006
	I have received good news from various schools. I have been accepted to the joint UCSF/UCB program in Bioengineering. I am struggling with decision at this time, particularly between Columbia, Stanford and the joint program. Stanford has offered me the SGF (Stanford Graduate Fellowship). At Columbia I am very excited by the prospect of working with various professors! UCSF/UCB has the benefit of having the largest number of faculty members in the field (with the exception of UW). I have declined admissions to USC and Cornell. I was informed today that at Cornell I had received the Presidential Genomics Fellowship, after turning down the program. The fellowship provides additional access to more faculty members, making the school even more difficult to dismiss. However, I'm not confident it is the right program for me.
Links: ♦ Stanford Graduate Fellowship ♦ Bioengineering at UCSF/UCB ♦ Cornell's Presidential Genomics Fellowship

	Cancellations and some positive news	Tuesday, March 14, 2006
	Unfortunately I will have to cancel my trip to Italy, but I have begun to hear news from the various schools to which I have applied. I have received offers from Cornell, Stanford, USC, Columbia, UCSD, and UW. I am eagerly awaiting the news from the UCSF/UCB joint program in Bioengineering since my interview two weeks ago, as well as details on fellowship information from Cornell and Stanford. I was honored to have received a fellowship from USC; however I have decided the program is not a perfect fit for me. They have an excellent program and outstanding facilities! I will also not be able to visit Cornell's Ithaca campus, and as a result I feel I will not be able to accept the offer for admission from that school.
Links: ♦ Biomedical Informatics(BMI) Stanford ♦ Tri-Institutional Computational Biology and Medicine (Cornell and Sloan Kettering) ♦ Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics (Columbia) ♦ USC's program in Computational Molecular Biology and Bioinformatics ♦ UW Genome Sciences ♦ Bioinformatics at UCSD

	RECOMB 2006 Travel Fellowship supported by DOE-NSF	Friday, February 17, 2006
	I received a RECOMB 2006 Travel Fellowship supported by DOE-NSF for travel to Venice in April! This means I will be attending RECOMB and I will be given the opportunity to interact with amazing researchers in my future field!
Links: ♦ RECOMB 2006

	RECOMB2006	Saturday, January 17, 2006
	Today we completed the RECOMB Anniversary paper which will appear in the proceedings of the 10th Annual International Conference on Computational Biology with a full citation to follow. In addition I submitted an abstract to RECOMB in hope of earning a travel grant to Venice, Italy in April.
Links: ♦ 10th Annual International Conference on Computational Biology

	American Society of Hematology 2005	Monday, December 12, 2005
	Bradley Messmer presents ours work at ASH 2005 in Atlanta. Talk title: "A Bioinformatic Approach to CLL IGHV Sequence Analysis Identifies Extensive Ig Sequence Archetypes among Both Mutated and Unmutated Sequences" A full citation is available in my CV, The full abstract is available on the ASH website.
Links: ♦ CV ♦ American Society of Hemotology (ASH)

	Graduation	Friday, December 9, 2005
	I completed my Bachelor's Degree at UCSD this December. I am continuing my work at the Moores Cancer Center before starting graduate school in Fall 2006.
Links: ♦ UCSD Homepage ♦ UCSD Cancer Center

	Computing Research Association Outstanding Undergraduate Award	Tuesday, November 29, 2005
	I was named as one of 5 Female Finalists in the US and Canada for the CRA 2006 Outstanding Undergraduate Award Winners. For further details visit the CRA Website To see the UCSD announcement visit the UCSD CSE Website
Links: ♦ Computing Research Association (CRA) ♦ UCSD Computer Science&Engineering (CSE)

	SoCalBSI	Friday, August 19, 2005
	The presentation I gave at the end of my summer program giving information on the body of work I completed at my summer internship is now posted online on the SoCalBSI website. I spent my internship at the Wold Lab at the California Institute of Technology. It was a great experience and I am going to continue working in the lab. The summer program itself was great. While I had already learned a lot of the material presented in the courses in my Bioinformatics classes, it is a great way for students without these integrated courses to get a taste of the field. The extra portions of presentations, CV/resume development and interview skills are definitely going to come in handy during grad school, or getting a job if no schools accept me this time around!
Links: ♦ Southern California Bioinformatics Summer Institute(SoCalBSI) ♦ SoCalBSI presentation

	Presentation posted on Bioalgoithms.info
	My class presentation for Molecular Sequence Analysis (BIMM/CSE/BENG/CHEM 181) on RNA secondary structure was recently posted on the website for the textbook An Introduction to Bioinformatics Algorithms by Neil C. Jones and Pavel A. Pevzner. It is available on the Powerpoint Slides Page. To any students at UCSD I think this is a great course! Definitely worth taking if you're interested in Bioinformatics. Students in the course were not all in the major.
Links: ♦ Bioalgorithms.info Powerpoint Slides

	Introductions
	Hello all, I am a 4th year UCSD student majoring in Biology with a specialization in Bioinformatics, a major that began at my school 4 years ago. I recently decided I was going to pursue a career in research after spending some time at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in the Geological Data Center building a virtual library of Scripps cruises over the last century. I began working on a research project with Ben Raphael, a postdoctoral fellow in the Pevzner lab at UCSD. A fellow graduate school-bound student, Angela Brooks, had advised me to participate in a summer research program, the Southern California Bioinformatics Summer Institute (SoCalBSI), to which I have been accepted! It is an excellent program with both a didactic and research portion (for which I will get assigned to either an academic or industry site) which also includes a stipend for living expenses. I hope to work at a university. In the fall I will have to take my GRE and I am also planning on taking a preparatory course through Princeton Review in order to get acclimated with the Computer Adaptive Tests the exam uses. Wish me luck!
Links: ♦ UCSD Biology's Bioinformatics major