Chilukuri K. Mohan, professor in electrical engineering and computer science, and his Ph.D. student Youchuan Wang G’20 G’24 have received the Best Paper Award at the 17th Annual Conference on Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (BICOB). Established in 2009, BICOB is one of the most recognized conferences in the fields of bioinformatics and computational biology. The conference is committed to creating an engaging environment for scientists to connect, present and publish their research findings, methodologies and studies.
BICOB-2025 took place in San Francisco, California from March 17-18 where Wang presented their paper, “Transitive Reduction and Cluster Normalization for Improved Gene Regulatory Network Inference.” Biological processes require complex sequences of expression of various genes, generating RNA and proteins and regulatory networks are sparse graphs that model which genes influence which other genes. Wang and Mohan’s research applies machine learning and computational methods to learn such models from available data.