Treehouse’s Where Do Our Graduates Go is a series that features our former graduate students in the Vaske Lab! Let’s catch up with Dr. Sanders, Dr. Pfile, and Dr. Anastopoulos. Dr.Lauren Sanders Where they are now:  Dr. Lauren Sanders is a staff scientist with Blue Marble Space Institute of Science, supporting the NASA Open Science Data Repository as the acting Project Scientist. She is also involved in leading the Artificial Intelligence for Life in Space working group (AI4LS). This work focuses on using artificial intelligence, machine learning, and space biological data to characte ..read more

By Emily Cerf Robert McCabe and his sisters. Robert has survived pediatric brain cancer and thyroid cancer. Robert McCabe of Anchorage, Alaska, is a 15-year-old avid bowler, a fan of baseball and basketball, and a rising high school sophomore who hopes to be an engineer one day. He is also a pediatric cancer survivor, and most recently, a pediatric cancer researcher. This summer, he helped to sequence and analyze a tumor sample in the lab of the UC Santa Cruz Treehouse Childhood Cancer Initiative. In late July, Robert joined his older sister, Molly (Cowell ’22, molecular, cellular and d ..read more

By Emily Cerf A new $100,000 grant from the St. Baldrick’s Foundation will provide UC Santa Cruz’s Treehouse Childhood Cancer Initiative funding to expand efforts to study rare pediatric cancers. The Treehouse Childhood Cancer Initiative, a project of the UCSC Genomics Institute, uses computational approaches to study RNA sequencing data from pediatric cancer cases that doctors can then use to diagnose and treat rare diseases. They have built a database of childhood cancer tumor types, gathering patient data across institutions to better study the rare conditions and allow other ..read more

Treehouse undergraduate researcher Molly McCabe just visited Washington, D.C. to advocate for kids with cancer as part of Kids v. Cancer’s “Climb the Hill” event.   Molly and a group of seven other young advocates went to Washington, D.C. to meet with senators and advocate for the Give Kids a Chance Act. This act is a bipartisan amendment to the RACE for Children Act that would allow the FDA to require pediatric clinical trials for companies researching combination therapy for adult cancers. Pediatric cancers are understudied compared to adult cancers, and this act could help find vital t ..read more

Allison Cheney, Graduate Student September is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month. To help spread awareness of the different cancers that impact children, we will be profiling a different researcher each week to talk about the cancer they study and how they hope their research will help in the fight against childhood cancer.   What type of cancer do you research? I am researching pediatric brain tumors, specifically pediatric high grade gliomas (pHGG) and ependymomas. pHGGs usually affect elementary school aged children, and are incurable and fatal at this time.    How might t ..read more

Molly McCabe with her mother, who she lost to cancer when she was 13. Molly McCabe, Undergraduate Researcher September is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month. To help spread awareness of the different cancers that impact children, we will be profiling a different researcher each week to talk about the cancer they study, their motivations for doing this research, and how they hope their research will help in the fight against childhood cancer.     What motivates you to do this research? Cancer has impacted me deeply. I lost my mother to melanoma when I was 13 years old, and my now ..read more

Krizia Chambers, Graduate Student, Biomedical Sciences and Engineering September is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month. To help spread awareness of the different cancers that impact children, we will be profiling a different researcher each week to talk about the cancer they study and how they hope their research will help in the fight against childhood cancer.     What type of cancer are you researching? My current research is focused on Osteosarcoma. The disease is a type of bone cancer that develops in children, teens, and young adults and originates in the cells that form the ..read more

Yvonne Vasquez, Graduate Student, MCD Biology September is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month. To help spread awareness of the different cancers that impact children, we will be profiling a different researcher each week to talk about the cancer they study, their motivations for doing this research, and how they hope their research will help in the fight against childhood cancer.   What type of cancer do you research? My lab studies rare cancers that occur in kids and young adults. Our lab’s goal is to learn more about pediatric cancers and identify more effective and less toxic treatm ..read more

Click through to see photos of the event ..read more

 Dylan Shiramizu at his new workplace. ? courtesy of Shiramizu. September 27, 2021 – We are incredibly proud of our Treehouse Undergraduate Bioinformatics immersion (TUBI) research group and what they’ve been able to accomplish here at UCSC. Case in point is research group member, proud Slug and 2021 UCSC graduate Dylan Shiramizu. Dylan wrote to us this month, saying “I am excited to announce that I have accepted my offer as a Research Bioinformatician 1 at the Vujkovic-Cvijin Lab at Cedars Sinai Medical Center. My work there will be centered around microbiome science. … I really apprec ..read more