Baskin Engineering graduate students Juanita Gomez and Prajna Hebbar have advanced to the final round of the 2025 UC Santa Cruz Grad Slam. They will compete against finalists from other UCSC academic divisions in the campus-wide Grad Slam finale on March 1.
Grad Slam is an annual communication competition hosted by the UCSC Graduate Division, where graduate students present their research in just three minutes, making it accessible and engaging for a nontechnical audience. The winner of the UCSC Grad Slam will advance to the UC-wide Grad Slam, and compete against graduate students from other University of California campuses.
Fortifying open source: securing the code that powers research
Computer science and engineering Ph.D. student Juanita Gomez is on a mission to enhance the security of scientific open-source software and minimize the burden on code maintainers.
Open-source software (OSS) serves as the backbone of the digital world, supporting everything from research labs to global communication networks. However, recent security breaches have exposed critical security risks in OSS. Many open-source projects are maintained by small teams or individual volunteers who often lack the time and resources to implement robust security measures.
Under the guidance of Professors of Computer Science and Engineering Alvaro Cárdenas and James Davis, and in collaboration with the UCSC Open Source Program Office (OSPO), Gomez is surveying open source developers to identify key security challenges and understand their unique needs. She is developing specialized security metrics and tools to assess the security strength of OSS projects, leveraging automation and AI to streamline tasks such as vulnerability detection—reducing the reliance on manual work.
“I’m excited for the opportunity to share about the importance of open-source security with a broader audience,” said Gomez. “And to give the UCSC community a glimpse of what I’m most passionate about.”
Looking for genes in genomes
Biomolecular engineering and bioinformatics Ph.D. student Prajna Hebbar is developing methods to improve genome annotation, which is a process that identifies and maps genes within a species’ genome assembly.
Advancements in genome sequencing and assembly techniques have significantly improved in recent years, providing complete genetic sequences—the unique arrangement of adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G), and thymine (T)—for more than 5,000 species. However, understanding the content of these sequences requires precise annotation methods, which help scientists understand the location and function of genes and other genetic elements.
To address this challenge, Hebbar is working on software called the Comparative Annotation Toolkit (CAT), which enhances the accuracy, speed, and efficiency of gene annotation. With CAT, biologists studying a particular species or subspecies can annotate genes more effectively, gaining insights that contribute to new biological discoveries.
“It’s a really exciting time in genomics with a lot of ongoing large-scale efforts to generate genome assemblies for thousands of vertebrate species,” said Hebbar. “I’m super stoked to be in this position to use my software to study these genes.”
Hebbar is advised by Professor of Biomolecular Engineering Benedict Paten.
This block group hides your featured image, remove this block group to show your featured image again.
