Remember when you said you wanted to make a difference? Here is your chance.

Description

Activities:

Overview of Department & Mentor: The Department of Urology at Cedars-Sinai is dedicated to using the latest technology and surgical techniques to ensure the best care possible, leading to better outcomes and shorter recovery times. We also prioritize compassionate care, tailored to each patient's specific needs. In addition to providing exceptional patient care, our department is committed to advancing the field through research and education, as well as training the next generation of urologists. Dr. Sungyong You is a renown computational biologist leading the Urologic Oncology Bioinformatics and a highly funded researcher in the Urology Department.  As a faculty member, Dr. You have been mentoring many laboratory scientists at Cedars-Sinai and visiting scholars from other institutions by providing both technical working knowledge and analytical strategies that have been crucial to the development of mentees' working research projects.

Role Activities & Timeline: The candidate will learn and conduct computational analysis of various omics data to understand the genomics instability mechanisms in prostate cancer. In January 2027, the candidate will present her progress in the regular meeting for this project, which is linked with Dr. You's project ongoing. During this training, the candidate will have one-on-one project meetings with Dr. You and his lab members. The candidate will also attend monthly prostate cancer research meeting and the cancer biology joint lab meeting to present any research progress.

Month 1 (Aug 15 – Sep 14): Orientation and Technical Foundation

Candidate will be provided guidance and training specific to computational analysis. This period will focus on setting up the research environment and familiarizing the candidate with the specific multi-omics datasets related to prostate cancer. Initial one-on-one meetings with Dr. You will commence to define specific project scopes.

Month 2 (Sep 15 – Oct 14): Data Pre-processing and Pipeline Training

Candidate will receive specialized training to process and normalize various omics data. The candidate will start attending the monthly prostate cancer research meetings and cancer biology joint lab meetings to understand the current landscape of the field and begin integrating with the lab team.

Month 3 (Oct 15 – Nov 14): Exploratory Analysis of Genomic Instability

Candidate will conduct initial computational analyses to identify preliminary patterns of genomics instability mechanisms in prostate cancer. Regular one-on-one project meetings with Dr. You and lab members will focus on troubleshooting pipelines and interpreting early-stage bioinformatics outputs.

Month 4 (Nov 15 – Dec 14): In-depth Omics Integration and Mechanism Study

Candidate will perform integrated analysis of various omics data (e.g., transcriptomics, genomics) to pinpoint key drivers of genomic instability. The candidate will prepare brief updates for the cancer biology joint lab meeting, receiving feedback from a broader peer group.

Month 5 (Dec 15 – Jan 14): Presentation Preparation and Project Synthesis

Candidate will focus on synthesizing research findings from the previous months. Efforts will be dedicated to preparing high-quality visual data and slides for the major progress presentation in January. Coordination with Dr. You's ongoing project will be prioritized to ensure alignment of results.

Month 6 (Jan 15 – Feb 15): Formal Progress Presentation and Phase Finalization

In January 2027, the candidate will present her research progress in the regular project meeting. Following the presentation, the candidate will spend the remaining period addressing feedback, refining the computational models, and outlining the next phase of the genomic instability study based on the project's ongoing requirements.

Role Summary & Objectives: We have collected the genomics and transcriptomics data of prostate cancer patients from public databases such as TCGA and GEO. Dr You recently developed a method to score the genomics instability level using gene expression signature and applied to existing patient transcriptome data with significant performance. The candidate will join this project, especially for data integration and network modeling for publication purpose. Multi-omics data analysis and classifier modeling is the specialized area of mentor's research scheme. The mentor (Dr. Sungyong You) will have regular meetings with candidate twice a week and deliver the training for data integration methods and computational modeling.