Recipients of cMEDA 2025 summer research grants and scholarships
We are excited to announce the recipients of the Center for Microbiome Engineering and Data Analysis (cMEDA) summer research programs.
Student Summer Research Scholarships
- Sareh Bayatpour – Doctoral Student, Biochemistry
“Dissecting the Role of the Gut Microbiome in Bile Acid Dysregulation and Cholestatic Liver Injury Using Mdr2 Knockout Mice” Mentor: Dr. Huiping Zhou - Cecile Brinkley – Medical Student, Medicine
“Host Response to Vaginal Microbiome” Mentor: Dr. Gregory A. Buck, Ph.D. - Claire Gillaspie – Undergraduate Student, Computer Science
“Optimize Generative LLMs Using Prompt Tuning and Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning for Named Entity Recognition of Microbiome Entities” Mentor: Dr. Bridget McInnes - Eunice (Yewon) Lee – Undergraduate Student, Statistical Science
“Disentangling Viral, Bacterial, and Host Interactions in HPV+ and HPV– HNSCC at Single-Cell Resolution” Mentor: Kevin Matthew Byrd, DDS, Ph.D. - Jannat – Master’s Student, Computer Science
“Joint Extraction of Microbiome Entities and Relations using Graph Retrieval Augmented Generation” Mentor: Dr. Bridget McInnes - Mary Wells – Undergraduate Student, Forensic Science
“Bacteria as Trace Evidence: Bacterial Exchange Between Human Skin and Clothing to Link the Suspect to the Crime Scene” Mentor: Dr. Baneshwar Singh
Faculty / Postdoc Seed Grants
- Dr. Michael Donnenberg – Department of Internal Medicine
“Establishing Feasibility of Rapidly Identifying Human and Oyster Pathogens by Performing Nucleic Acid Sequencing in the Field” - Dr. Katarzyna Tyc – Department of Biostatistics
“Spatial Transcriptomic Profiling of Microbiota Interactions with Host Cells Using the Visium HD Platform”