Rui Yin Receives Outstanding Graduate Assistant Award and NCI-UMD Fellowship

Graduate student Rui Yin received an NCI-UMD Fellowship and was awarded the Outstanding Graduate Assistant Award by the University of Maryland Graduate School. 

The Outstanding Graduate Assistant Award is a prestigious award given to the top 2% of campus graduate assistants each year and recognizes the outstanding contributions these individuals have provided to the university. 

Yin's NCI-UMD fellowship will provide her funding for her research on developing and improving a T cell receptor-peptide-MHC complex structure prediction algorithm under the joint supervision of Dr. Brian Pierce (Associate Professor, IBBR, UMD CBMG Department) and NCI Collaborator Dr. Paul Robbins. 

Yin is a fifth-year biological sciences Ph.D. student at the University of Maryland. Her interests and research specifically focus on developing engineering and modeling tools for protein-protein interactions. Working in the Pierce lab, Yin previously co-built a database for SARS-CoV-2 protein structures leading to significant advances in revealing structural and energetic features of SARS-CoV-2 targeting antibodies. Her work currently focuses on investigating immune recognition modeling utilizing artificial intelligence-based approaches, including AlphaFold. Rui looks forward to continuing her research on protein interactions to help advance this field and its applications to disease treatment.