Myra is a rising senior at the University of Chicago majoring in Molecular Engineering with a specialization in Bioengineering. She recently joined Dr. Joshua Weinstein’s lab, where she is helping to develop DNA microscopy, an imaging technology that uses DNA rather than light as an imaging medium. As a UCLA Amgen Scholar, Myra is working under Dr. Aaron Meyer in the Department of Bioengineering to apply machine learning techniques to traditional biological modeling problems. The mathematical modeling of gene regulatory networks is useful for a variety of clinical and research applications, but these network models are rarely formulated for large numbers of genes. The Meyer Lab is using machine learning rather than traditional numerical methods to solve network models at the genome scale. Myra’s goal this summer is to apply this method to data obtained from molecular intervention and profiling experiments, in which thousands of genes were knocked down and their transcriptional effects were measured. She will then quantify how similar the resulting network models are across cell lines to show that the technique produces a consistent map of gene regulatory interactions independent of cellular context. Myra would like to thank the members of the Meyer Lab for providing her with this opportunity, as well as the Amgen Foundation for funding her research at UCLA this summer.