Ph.D. Presentations

Name: Bondar, G. (AM) – Geometric and Graph Structured Optimal Transport for Learning and Control
Start: 2026-11-23T08:00:00-08:00
End: 2026-11-23T09:00:00-08:00

September 2026
Headrick, C. (BMEB) – The Regulation of mRNA Cleavage in Nonsense-mediated mRNA Decay: From Inside (intra-pathway determinants) Out (extra-pathway regulation)

September 21 @ 11:30 am – 12:30 pm

Biomedical Sciences Building 575 McLaughlin Drive

Nonsense-mediated mRNA decay (NMD) is a translation-coupled quality control pathway that degrades mRNAs that harbor a premature termination codon (PTC) and 5-30% of normal cellular mRNAs. The NMD field sits at a pivotal moment with recent developments that endonucleolytic cleavage is the primary mechanism of mRNA decay conserved across metazoans. Discovery of a conserved NMD […]
Mastoras, M. (BMEB) – Polishing genome assemblies and leveraging their improved quality to study centromere variation

September 25 @ 1:00 pm – 3:00 pm

Physical Sciences Building Physical Sciences Building, Santa Cruz, CA

Hybrid Event

A complete and accurate genome reconstruction serves as the foundation for studying an organism’s biology and the mechanisms underlying disease. It is particularly critical for reference genomes, which provide a […]
Malekos, E. (BMEB) – CRISPR screens of noncanonical ORFs uncover retroviral-derived immune regulators

September 25 @ 3:00 pm – 4:00 pm

Biomedical Sciences Biomedical Sciences Building Red Hill Road, Santa Cruz, CA

Ribosome profiling has revealed thousands of noncanonical translation events across mammalian genomes, yet functional characterization has overwhelmingly focused on proliferative fitness in cancer cell lines. Here, we present a comprehensive survey of noncanonical translation in the mouse immune system and its functional consequences in macrophages. By performing a unified Ribo-seq meta-analysis across 20 public mouse […]
Heath, H. (BMEB) – Linking Altered mRNA Processing to Translational Regulation in Lung Cancer

September 29 @ 1:30 pm – 2:30 pm

Biomedical Sciences Biomedical Sciences Building Red Hill Road, Santa Cruz, CA

Hybrid Event

In lung cancer, recurrent alterations in RNA processing regulators reshape both the proteins genes encode and the sequences that regulate their production. Understanding how mRNA processing influences protein production requires […]
October 2026
Kawano, S. (STAT) – Model Validation and Dependent Shrinkage Priors for Small Area Estimation

October 19 @ 9:30 am – 11:30 am

Engineering 2 Engineering 2 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA

Hybrid Event

This dissertation addresses two questions in survey methodology: How can we produce granular, reliable estimates? And how can we validate them without ground truth? We develop three methods: (1) Gaussian […]
November 2026
Bondar, G. (AM) – Geometric and Graph Structured Optimal Transport for Learning and Control

November 23 @ 8:00 am

Engineering 2 Engineering 2 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA

Hybrid Event

We motivate, formulate, and solve several structured optimal transportation (OT) problems for learning and control. The field of OT had its inception in 1781, when Gaspard Monge sought the optimal map to transport mass from a given initial distribution to a desired terminal distribution. Both OT and its entropy-regularized variant, the Schrödinger bridge problem (SBP), […]

September 2026

October 2026

November 2026