September 1st, 2026
JXTX + CSHL 2026 Biological Data Science Awardees
JXTX: The James P. Taylor Foundation for Open Science is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2026 JXTX+CSHL Biological Data Science Scholarships. The JXTX Foundation provides support for students to attend conferences in computational biology and data science, where they can present their work and form connections with other researchers in the field.
Three graduate students were awarded this set of JXTX+CSHL scholarships. These awardees will present their work at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) Biological Data Science Conference, November 4-7, 2026. Awardees represent three institutions across the United Kingdom and the United States, and are presenting a wide range of research at the meeting.
Jacob Gonzalez Isa
University of Cambridge
Jacob Gonzalez Isa is a Ph.D. student in Plant Sciences at the University of Cambridge, supervised by Prof. Ian Henderson. He works across wet-lab molecular biology and bioinformatics, approaching centromere evolution and genomics from several angles at once, most recently using single-molecule sequencing to study both meiotic recombination and somatic evolution. He is also interested in repetitive DNA across the eukaryotic Tree of Life, which he explores through comparative phylogenomics. Outside the lab, Jacob is committed to widening access to higher education, and enjoys football, tennis, and writing.
Alyssa Obermayer
University of South Florida / Moffitt Cancer Center
Alyssa Obermayer is a second-year Ph.D. student in Public Health with a concentration in Genomics at the University of South Florida, Tampa, advised by Dr. Xiaoming Liu, and a research data analyst at Moffitt Cancer Center, advised by Dr. Timothy Shaw. Her research emphasizes open-source tools for reproducible and interactive bioinformatics analysis, focusing recently on nonsense-mediated mRNA decay, its relationship with alternative splicing and transcript features, and their potential impact on treatment resistance in cancer. Outside of research, Alyssa enjoys Florida's nature trails, video games, puzzles, and her cats.
Zahra Zare Jousheghani
University of Maryland, College Park
Zahra Zare Jousheghani is a Ph.D. candidate in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she works at the Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology under the supervision of Dr. Rob Patro. Her research develops statistical and computational methods to improve transcript abundance estimation from bulk and single-cell long-read RNA-seq data. She is lead author of the Bioinformatics paper introducing Oarfish, an open-source tool that uses probabilistic modeling for that task. She also contributes to open science through open-source software, reproducible benchmarking workflows, and public datasets.
About JXTX: The James P. Taylor Foundation for Open Science
"The most important job of senior faculty is to mentor junior faculty and students." These are the words that Professor James P. Taylor, the Ralph S. O'Connor Professor at the Departments of Biology and Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University said and lived by. This, he believed, was imperative to advance science, and in a way that facilitated diversity and inclusion. The mission of this foundation is to continue his legacy, through a multifaceted approach which will be unrolled across several stages.
Towards the goal of advancing mentorship, the JXTX Foundation will organize and host mentoring sessions between senior and junior faculty members at select high-profile meetings. The Foundation also aims to attract new scholars, including high school and undergrad students, to computational biology and data science, and to form connections and opportunities for members of underrepresented minority populations.
According to his colleagues, James hated self-promotion. But the community would be done a grave disservice if the seeds planted by Dr. Taylor were not nourished to grow and flourish. Thank you to those who have generously contributed.
Please consider making a donation to support James Taylor's legacy.