Expanding Horizons with the 2025 JGI-UC Merced Internship Cohort

Interns contributed to a number of projects, from refining lab protocols at the bench to applying artificial intelligence to aspects of research questions

Another intern summer has closed at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Joint Genome Institute, a DOE Office of Science User Facility. This year, the 12th JGI-UC Merced cohort consisted of three undergraduate students and eight graduate students, hosted by 18 JGI staff. One of the mentors, postdoc Yumary Vasquez, was herself a program alum from the 2022 cohort. 

The UC Merced interns attended professional development workshops on science communication and technical writing while also making new connections with both researchers and other interns. At the end of the summer, three of the graduate student interns一Socheata Hour, Yibing Wang, and Brandon Imstepf一were selected to continue their research projects through the DOE RENEW grant initiative when school starts in the fall. 

Outside of the technical aspect of her project, Hour mentioned that she had gained knowledge in bioinformatics and machine learning. “Also,” she added, ”I’ve developed efficient skills in working with high performance computing and had an amazing opportunity to collaborate and network with talented scientists and staff at the JGI.”

Listed below are the interns, their mentors, and their summer projects:

• Undergraduate interns
  • Brandon Barana
    • Mentor: Zhong Wang
    • Project: Embeddings Based Clustering of Biosynthetic Gene Cluster for Novel Natural Product Discovery
  • Kayla Kelly
    • Mentors: Kyra Eyerman, Hualan Liu
    • Project: Promoter Characterization of the Bacillota Bacterial Phylum
  • Saray Maeda
    • Mentors: Jonelle Basso, Heejung Cho
    • Project: Characterizing how resident phages shape their host phenotype
• Graduate interns
  • Adeola Fagbayibo
    • Mentor: Thasneem Banu Frousnoon
    • Project: Optimizing transformation protocol for higher efficiency in Issatchenkia orientalis using electroportation and heat shock methods
  • Asees Kaur
    • Mentors: Asaf Salamov, Igor Grigoriev
    • Project: Training new JGI genomes with Tiberius
  • Brandon Imstepf
    • Mentor: Brian Bushnell
    • Project: Machine Learning Applications in Gene Annotation
  • Masato Terasaki
    • Mentor: Yumary Vasquez
    • Project: AI Agent for Giant Virus Research
  • Mohammad Abdulqader
    • Mentors: Andrei Steindorff, Robert Riley, Jasmyn Pangilinan, Kurt LaButti
    • Project: Prediction and Identification of Mitochondrial Plasmids from DNA Sequence
  • Moitrish Majumdar
    • Mentors: Bikash Shrestha, Crysten Blaby-Haas
    • Project: Intermolecular isopeptide bond detection
  • Socheata Hour
    • Mentors: Jonelle Basso, Heejung Cho
    • Project: Development of a computational pipeline to detect tailocin from bacterial growth
  • Yibing Wang
    • Mentors: Tomoya Honda, Dung Mai
    • Project: Designing Synthetic Chemoreceptors for Neurotransmitter Sensing

Watch this short video below to see what some of the interns had to say about their time at the lab.