Sunny Yu, a senior in bioengineering at Rice, earned a Research Excellence Award in the recently completed Bruins in Genomics: Dental, Oral, and Craniofacial (BIG DOC) Research Training Program at UCLA.
Yu is one of 27 undergraduates from across the country who conducted graduate-level genomics research at UCLA. She spent eight weeks this summer working in the UCLA School of Dentistry laboratories and the David Geffen School of Medicine.
“Sunny has done excellent work in our lab. She learned lab techniques and scientific theory fast and transformed them into research practiced in biomaterials and tissue engineering,” said her mentor for the summer, Weihao Yuan, a postdoctoral scholar at UCLA.
The program is funded by a $1.6 million grant from the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research, a division of the National Institutes of Health. Yu was instructed in next-generation sequencing and other computational data science analyses related to dental, oral, and craniofacial research through hands-on workshops and laboratory experiments