2025 Summer Internship
About the DBMI Summer Internship Program
Since 2011, we have organized an annual 8 - 10 week summer biomedical informatics internship program that has been funded by research grants or cooperative agreements. The summer internship program includes:
- Structured orientation
- Weekly scientific presentations by faculty
- Organized social events
- Internship symposium (webcast)
We have hosted over 100 trainees from over 40 institutions as part of our summer internship, including trainees for the NIH Short Term Training Positions (STTP) program. The program has generated more than 30 peer-reviewed articles and dozens of scientific posters.
The internship uses a project-based curriculum where interns need to select a project and mentor during the application process. Trainees work on projects covering a wide range of topics relevant to biomedical informatics, including data integration, image processing, natural language processing (NLP) tools, data sharing and privacy technology, etc.
15th Annual UC San Diego Department of Biomedical Informatics Summer Internship Program Symposium Recap
Event held on Tuesday, August 12, 2025
Link to Intern Presentations
Opening Presentation:
University of California San Diego
Clinical Professor, Division of Biomedical Informatics, Division of General Internal Medicine
Chief Medical Information Officer, Population Health, UCSDH
Interim Chief, Division of Biomedical Informatics, UCSD
Interim Chair, Department of Biomedical Informatics, UCSDH
Co-Principal Investigator, California Integrated Vital Records System
Site Principal Investigator, UCSD NIH All of Us, https://www.allofusucsd.org/en/about-us
Primary Care Internist, Internal Medicine
Keynote Speaker:
Senior Bioinformatic Scientist at Natera.
Dr. Caitlin Guccione is currently working as a Senior Bioinformatic Scientist at Natera. In her role, she is part of the cancer early detection team looking for trace amounts of tumor DNA in the blood. She recently earned her PhD in Bioinformatics and Systems Biology from UC San Diego, where she investigated the cancer microbiome in the labs of Dr. Kit Curtius and Dr. Rob Knight. Dr. Guccione also holds a master’s degree in Applied Mathematics and a bachelor’s degree in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Rhode Island.
Presenters:
Hillary Calderon is a recent graduate of UC Irvine with a bachelor's degree in public health sciences. This summer, she conducted research on primary open angle glaucoma and the development of an artificial intelligence model to predict glaucoma diagnosis and progression. She will continue her education by pursuing a master’s degree in biostatistics at UC Irvine with a research focus on community health and preventative medicine. She hopes to pursue a doctorate degree in the future and enter academia.
Presentation Title: Standardizing Glaucoma Phenotypes Across Projects Funded by the National Eye Institute
Advisor: Sally Baxter M.D.
Funding: UCSD HSI-DDI & UCSD STARS
Andrea Calderon is a first-generation, rising fourth-year Computer Science student at UC San Diego. Under the mentorship of Dr. Carter and PhD student TJ Sears, Andrea retrained T1GRS, a genetic risk score machine learning model that predicts Type 1 Diabetes (T1D) risk using genetic variants from a dataset of 30,000 individuals. By focusing on genetic features specifically associated with innate immune cells, this project aims to clarify how innate immunity influences T1D development.
Presentation Title: Retraining Classifier Machine Learning Model to Assess Role of Innate Immunity in Type 1 Diabetes Risk
Advisor: Hannah Carter Ph.D
Funding: UCSD HSI-DDI & UCSD STARS
Hannah Bratten is a rising second year computer science major, bioinformatics minor at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. Within the bioinformatics field, Hannah is interested in genomics and how genetic factors can influence cancer and other diseases. This summer, she is focusing on using machine learning models on genetic data to predict coronary artery calcium presence in individuals of varying ancestry groups, and using this information to determine what genetic factors are driving these predictions. Hannah hopes to continue pursuing research in her undergrad, and eventually go on to get a Ph.D in bioinformatics!
Presentation Title: Predicting Coronary Artery Calcium Presence Using Machine Learning
Advisor: Hannah Carter Ph.D
Funding: UCSD HSI-DDI & UCSD STARS
Emily Bautista is a rising third-year undergraduate student at UCLA, majoring in Computational and Systems Biology. She is passionate about the intersection between healthcare and data-driven solutions and plans to pursue a PhD in either biostatistics or bioinformatics after graduation. Under the guidance of Dr. Brian Clay, Emily's project focuses on analyzing referral patterns to the emergency department, aiming to reduce overcrowding and enhance patient flow. Through this work and her future studies, Emily strives to utilize her strong computational and clinical informatics background to improve healthcare outcomes.
Presentation Title: Analyzing Referral Patterns to the Emergency Department
Advisor: Brian Clay M.D.
Funding: UCSD HSI-DDI
Kavya Kamath is a rising senior at Princeton University, majoring in Molecular Biology with minors in Statistics & Machine Learning, Quantitative & Computational Biology, and Computer Science. This summer, she conducted research in the Quantitative Cancer Control Lab under the guidance of Dr. Kit Curtius, investigating the relationship between copy number alterations and defined dysplastic phenotypes of precancerous colorectal lesions among patients with inflammatory bowel disease. She plans to pursue a Ph.D. in Bioinformatics and aspires to a career in cancer research and computational biology.
Presentation Title: Investigating the Genetic Underpinnings of Dysplasia Phenotypes in Patients with Inflammatory Bowel Disease
Advisor: Kathleen Curtius Ph.D
Funding: UCSD HSI-DDI
Catherina Santoso is a rising senior at UC San Diego majoring in Public Health with a concentration in Biostatistics. She is passionate about leveraging patient outcomes to improve healthcare. This summer, under the mentorship of Dr. Jejo Koola, her research focuses on serving as a clinical research coordinator for the BREATH study which aims to diagnose Obstructive Sleep Apnea (OSA) using tongue EMG and machine learning algorithm. Her research also involves identifying the clinical and physiological factors associated with diagnostic discordance between in-lab Polysomnography (PSG) and Home Sleep Testing (HST) in patients with OSA. After graduation she aspires to pursue a career as a Biostatistician and a Master’s degree in Biostatistics. A couple areas of research she is interested in is women’s health and cancer.
Presentation Title: Investigating Discordance Between Home Sleep Testing and Polysomnography in OSA Assessment
Advisor: Jejo Koola M.D.
Funding: UCSD HSI-DDI
Elizabeth Hirschbeck is a rising junior at Purdue University studying Brain and Behavioral Science with a strong interest in Psychology. At Purdue, she works in a social psychology research lab, examining interpersonal relationships. This summer, she is working on a project studying how clinical decision support tools can improve urinary incontinence care. After graduation, Elizabeth plans to apply to medical school and hopes to build a career that blends patient care with research.
Presentation Title: Evaluating Clinical Decision Support Use for Urinary Incontinence.
Advisor: Jejo Koola M.D.
Funding: UCSD HSI-DDI
Sophie Chang is a medical student at UC San Diego School of Medicine with a bachelor’s degree in Biological Sciences from Northwestern University. This summer, her research has focused on identifying hormone- and sex chromosome-driven differences in gene expression related to insulin resistance and cardiovascular disease. Her work aims to identify genes and molecular pathways driving cardiovascular disease risk to guide individualized screening and therapy for patients.
Presentation Title: Sex chromosome and hormone drivers of cardiovascular disease risk
Advisor: Amit Majithia M.D.
Funding: UCSD HSI-DDI
Jingtong (Jade) Liang is a rising senior at UCLA majoring in Microbiology, Immunology, and Molecular Genetics and minoring in Mathematics. She works with Dr. Sandip Patel and Dr. Tali Azenkot this summer to identify the demographic profiles and survival significance of Non-small cell lung cancer patients with KRASG12D mutations through Databricks and the UC Health Data Warehouse. This is her first time to conduct clinical research, and she's exciting to learn about data query with SQL and Python, statistical testing, data visualization, and so on. She values quantitative data-driven approaches in biomedical research and wants to pursue immunology, genomics, and informatics in graduate school.
Presentation Title: Demographic Profiles and Survival of KRAS G12D Mutation in Non-small Cell Lung Cancer
Advisor: Sandip Patel M.D.
Funding: UCSD HSI-DDI
Jonathan Phan is a rising Senior at San Diego State University (SDSU) majoring in Data Science and minoring in Computer Science. He is interested in clinical informatics and wants to leverage AI to improve clinical workflows and patient outcomes. This summer he is developing an open source python package designed to do predictive analytics using unstructured medical record notes.
Presentation Title: Notes-Caster: An Open-Source Python Toolkit For Clinical Note-Based Predictive Modeling
Advisor: Karandeep Singh M.D.
Ishani Ray is a graduate of Oklahoma State University, where she majored in Chemistry, Biochemistry, and Biostatistics. She currently works full-time as a post-baccalaureate research assistant in a pediatric neuro-oncology lab at Weill Cornell Medicine. Ishani is interested in bioinformatics and computational biology and is applying to MD and MD/PhD programs this application cycle. This summer, she is working with Dr. Amy Sitapati on a retrospective epidemiological study focused on the characterization of displaced populations and disparities in chronic disease and behavioral health outcomes, using existing clinical data.
Presentation Title: Beyond the Margins: Chronic Disease and Care Gaps in Displaced Populations
Advisor: Amy Sitapati M.D.
Funding: UCSD HSI-DD
Lan Do is a rising senior at the University of Texas at Austin, majoring in Chemical Engineering. He is passionate about integrating computational methods with biomedical research and plans to pursue a PhD in Bioinformatics. Under the mentorship of Dr. Pablo Tamayo, his current research focuses on developing a functional taxonomy of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) using non-negative matrix factorization (NMF). By identifying distinct molecular archetypes within HCC tumors, his work aims to improve understanding of tumor heterogeneity and contribute to more personalized cancer treatment strategies.
Presentation Title: A Functional Taxonomy of Hepatocellular Carcinoma.
Advisor: Pablo Tamayo Ph.D
Funding: UCSD HSI-DDI & UCSD STARS
Closing Presentations:
Jejo Koola, MD, MS
Internship Director
Matteo D'Antonio, PhD
Internship Director
