dondi
Southern California Conference for Undergraduate Research on Saturday, November 22
SCCUR will be held on Saturday, November 22 at Cal-State Channel Islands. Our seniors should plan to give a talk and our juniors should plan to give a poster. Abstracts are due October 12, which is a Sunday. So, we should plan to have them done and reviewed by Wednesday, October 8. https://www.sccur.org/
Team will look into availability and report back so we can decide if this is feasible
I can go and give a talk but I would love to get guidance on this! And I think it's also good to look for other opportunities too!
@ntran18 and @MilkaZek can give a joint talk for this; a recent poster can be decomposed into slides, after which we would hold practice sessions prior to the conference
The short-term target is to derive a prior abstract and fit it to SCCUR’s specifications. We can review this abstract at the next meeting and submit it before the due date
Reminder to @ntran18 and @MilkaZek to post an abstract on the wiki and link to it in the comments here. We want to do abstract review at the meeting on 10/8 because the abstract is due soon.
Here is the requirement of the abstract Link
The requirement stated that the title can only have 15 words. I don't know what the title should be. I took this from our most recent abstract from the LMU Symposium
We reviewed the abstract draft and were able to come up with a title of 15 or fewer words. Looking at the abstract specs, we also tried to structure the text to match SCCUR’s motivation -> study/methods -> outcomes outline
This is now ready for @kdahlquist to review asynchronously
I made some changes to the abstract that gives more equal weight to talking about GRNs and PPIs, which I think clarifies some of the background information. It is now 245 words. @dondi , should look at it one more time, otherwise, I think it is ready to submit.
Also, since @ntran18 and @MilkaZek are the ones presenting, I think @MilkaZek should be second author.
LGTM—ship it! @ntran18 once this has been submitted, please report it here and close the issue
I'm going to submit the abstract; however, I have some questions.
- For subject area, I chose Computer Science. I would appreciate confirmation that this is correct.
- I don't know where to put Cecilia, A'Kaia, and Amelie's names on this. There is a placeholder for abstract, and it's not where I put everyone's name. For faculty advisor, I only see one, and I'm not sure who to put.
Ah, they are not set up for multiple authors and mentors. Go ahead and just put you and Milka. You will acknowledge Cecilia's and Amelie's contributions in the talk itself. Likewise, go ahead and put @dondi as your mentor, and you can acknowledge me on your slides.
Computer Science is the correct area, unless they have something more specific like bioinformatics.
I got an email from SCCUR for resubmitting our abstract. Here is the feedback. I will take a look at some time and think how to improve it.
@ntran18 , when are the abstract revisions due? Will we be able to review in our meeting on Wednesday or do we need to do it sooner?
Since we are at the word limit, we would need to cut something to add the revisions they are asking for.
The abstract revision is due on this Thursday, November 6th! So we can revise together in the meeting!
I've made a draft we can keep building on during our 11/05 meeting, addressing some of the feedback and mostly rewriting things so that we have extra word count space. Original abstract and my draft can be found and edited here!
@MilkaZek , I'm moving this over to the wiki. We keep all of our abstracts on the wiki. https://github.com/dondi/GRNsight/wiki/2025-Southern-California-Conference-for-Undergraduate-Research-Abstract,-Ngoc-K.-Tran,-Cecilia-J.-Zaragoza,-A'Kaia-Phelps,-Amelie-Dinh,-and-Milka-Zekarias
This has been reviewed and is ready to submit—once submitted, @ntran18 and @MilkaZek can morph this issue into the one for creating the actual presentation
- Please use these presentation guidelines when constructing your talk.
- Upload your talk to the GRNsight-archive by 8:00 AM on 11/12/25; you will practice giving the presentation on Zoom at our meeting that morning. We will give you feedback on improving the slides and presentation.
- Please upload the revised slides by 8:00 AM on 11/19/25; we will meet in person in FEA 118 for our meeting that day for a live run-through. Use version control to upload newer versions of your slides to the GRNsight-archive.
- Feel free to use whatever slides/images/figures from the GRNsight-archive and post a comment if there is a figure you need that you can't find.
Logistics are to be determined next (i.e., who’s riding with whom). We’ll also disseminate once we know more specific details about the talk
Here is your slides with my notes. I edited some of the slides to give you some ideas of what I was talking about. Also, I'm attaching a file with the progression of screenshots that show the features and some other things you may find useful.
Tran_Zekarias_SCCUR_20251122.pptx
Here's an updated draft that addresses all feedback from Wednesday's practice run! I did want to clarify and ask if I correctly addressed the note about discussing replicate values on slide 23. I also followed through both options for the summary slide (using the diagram suggested and condensing our original summary slides) - which do you prefer, and do you have any feedback to improve the preferred slide? And of course, if anything else stands out that needs adjusting, we would appreciate those notes as well. Thank you!
For the gene expression model picture, I added it to the slides highlighting the node color slices, but just to make sure I fully understand how it ties in, here's how I'm thinking of it. The genes in DNA are being transcribed into complimentary mRNA strands, and the nodes/(genes/transcription factors) are displaying the expression levels of how much mRNA was transcribed from the original gene. Is this correct?
I changed the wording slightly on slide 23, but you have the gist. You are correct about the nodes displaying the amount of mRNA that was produced. I made a few tweaks and suggested some tweaks for you all to make, so please review the notes on each slide. Looking good!
I can't paste the file here because it is too large. I'll put it on Box and share the link.
Got it, thank you!! Looked through everything and it all made sense to me, and I made those tweaks as well on that file.
@MilkaZek and @ntran18, great job on your talk! There are a last few items to complete before we can close this issue:
- [x] Please post your final slides in the presentations folder in the GRNsight-archive repo.
- [x] Add your presentation to the Publications page under "Presentations".
- [x] Add a news item on the News page.