Elysia Chou receives Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship

Elysia Chou, graduate student in the Sartor lab in the Department of Computational Medicine & Bioinformatics, is a recipient of this year’s Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship. 

This fellowship, given annually by the Rackham Graduate School, supports outstanding doctoral students with a stipend that covers a year of their studies. The awardees are graduate students who have achieved candidacy and are working on researching and writing their dissertation. 

For her dissertation, Chou is developing computational methods that can help identify genes that may be associated with different diseases. While researchers have mapped the human genome, we still do not know what each and every gene does.  

“We know there's a lot of genetic variation that every human carries, and we think part of that is the key to understanding molecular mechanisms of how diseases happen in people,” Chou said. 

Chou built a model – called DisCO-VG – which allows her and her team to see which genetic variants and their target genes may be associated with diseases such as psoriasis and schizophrenia. Knowing which genes are involved will allow us to understand more about these diseases and could lead to the creation of future diagnostic tools or therapies. 

This work is part of the Impact of Genomic Variation on Function (IGVF) Consortium, of which Chou is a part of through the University of Michigan’s IGVF Predictive Modeling Center. Receiving the Rackham Fellowship means that Chou’s work with both groups will be financially supported.   

“Getting this fellowship means that I get to spend time on the Consortium work as well as on my dissertation,” Chou said. “This allows me to make more of a scientific impact and collaborate with more people.” 

Outside of lab work, Chou is highly involved with Girls Who Code, a program that teaches higher schoolers from populations underrepresented in STEM how to code. Chou has been director or co-director for the past three years. She is passionate about teaching tech literacy and responsible uses of generative AI. 

“Elysia is an exceptionally deserving recipient of the Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship,” said Maureen Sartor, PhD, Chou's mentor and a professor of computational medicine and bioinformatics. “Her dissertation work is highly ambitious, requiring mastery of several types of complex genomic analyses, and Elysia has built the methodology for her primary projects from the ground up, which I believe is a more impressive feat than she perhaps realizes. I am incredibly proud of both her accomplishments and the moral reserve she consistently exemplifies.”