Santhosh Kumar Karthikeyan, graduate student pursuing a Ph.D. in cancer biology in the lab of Sooryanarayana Varambally, Ph.D., Professor, Molecular and Cellular Pathology, was selected as first-place winner of the Midsouth Computational Biology and Bioinformatics Society’s (MCBIOS) 2024 Young Scientist Excellence Award.

Karthikeyan was selected to present the project, “MammOnc-DB: A Proteo-Genomic Platform for Comprehensive Breast Cancer Data Analysis, Integration and Visualization.” The tool is a data set analysis platform created for data analysis and visualization for breast cancer data.

Varambally is the creator of the UALCAN cancer research database, a free web tool that can be accessed online to analyze cancer data. It has been visited more than 1.24 million times and cited more than 5,000 times. MammOnc is a spinoff of UALCAN specific to breast cancer data.

The criteria for judging the awards including consideration of demonstrated multidisciplinary contribution and initiative, as well as the quality of oral presentations.