The CCBS Opportunity award competition is open to any UCI graduate student or postdoctoral researcher (including project scientists, specialists, etc.), who is present at the 2023 Sys Bio Retreat. Any pair (or trio) of individuals who meet the above criteria may jointly submit a proposal for this year's competition following the instructions below. The progress reports from previous years' awardees are available below.
2023 - 2024
Testing and refining hypotheses
By hypothesis, we mean a provisional explanation for a phenomenon of interest. The successful project will use interdisciplinary methods to validate, distinguish between, or refine a hypothesis or hypotheses.
PROJECT REQUIREMENTS
•The proposed project must be a short-term (up to 1 year), feasible research investigation that answers a question related to the proposers’ research.•It must be interdisciplinary: it must involve participation from at least two lab/research groups representing different disciplines or departments.•It must be a “new” project, and it must address the year’s theme.
•Your advisor/PI must agree to let you work on the project.•You/your team are expected to attend next year’s retreat and give a presentation on your progress (retreat registration fees are waived for opportunity awardees).
TO SUBMIT:
•Step I: Before 5:00 PM on Wednesday, April 5, hand in (or email to Emi) a one paragraph abstract (can even be handwritten) briefly describing the nature of the project.
•Step II: Send a more complete description (up to three pages) by email by MIDNIGHT on Monday, April 17, to Emi.
* The proposals will be judged by the CCBS faculty, based on significance, interdisciplinarity, feasibility, responsiveness to theme. *
2022 Award Winners!
| Title | Participants | Department(s) |
|---|---|---|
| Untangling Spaghetti and Meatballs: Theory-driven Feature Selection for Cell State Classification in Single Cell Transcriptomics | Emmanuel Dollinger (PI: S. Atwood and Q. Nie) Venus Sosa Iglesias (PI: S. Atwood) Kai Silkwood (PI: A. Lander) | Developmental & Cell Biology; Mathematics Developmental & Cell Biology Developmental & Cell Biology |
| Defining Epigenetic Drivers of Metastasis using the Cancer De-differentiation Theory | Tatyana Lev (PI: D. Lawson) Dennis Ma (PI: K. Kessenbrock) Ashley Avila (PI: T. Downing) | SOM- Physiology & Biophysics SOM - Biological Chemistry Biomedical Engineering |
| Revealing the Role of Neutrophils in BCC Tumors Using Single-cell Tracking | Lulu Lai (PI: S. Atwood) Pei Tan (PI: C. Miles) | Developmental & Cell Biology Mathematics |
| Developing a system to understand the vasculature of endothelial cells and its role in mediating the progression of glioblastoma | Sarah Eldeen (PI: E. Botvinick) Andres Guerrero (PI: P. Chang) | Biomedical Engineering SOM - Radiological Sciences |