Volunteership Summer 2026

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2026 Summer Volunteer Program Details

Dates

Application Deadline

May 15, 2026 | 12:00 PM ET

Please email your updated resume and projects in order of preference. Acceptance letter/email will be sent to candidates latest the day after the kick-off meeting.

Volunteer Zoom Kick-Off Meeting

Date TBD | 11:00 AM to 12:00 PM

Program Dates: June 1, 2026 – July 31, 2026 (9 weeks)

Remote | Hybrid for GW employees and students (Ross Hall 5th floor)

Spring 2026 Volunteership

Volunteer Expectations

  1. Minimum commitment of 20 hours per week.
  2. Progress updates via Slack at least 3 days per week (scrum).
  3. Volunteers should be responsive to email/slack communications.
  4. 30-minute Zoom meetings (during regular work hours) once a week or every other week with the assigned project point of contact (POC).
  5. Volunteers are expected to attend volunteership events such as a symposium.
  6. Attend some lectures or seminars remotely (max 4-5).
  7. This volunteership does not allow for vacation time.

Important: If the scrum is not updated for 2 consecutive working days, the candidate will be automatically dropped from the program.

Volunteership Support

Each group has dedicated Points of Contact (PoCs) who are your main resource for questions and guidance.

How to Get Help

Slack Group Channel

Use your group Slack channel as the primary place to ask questions and share ideas. This is strongly encouraged so everyone can learn together. Direct messages to PoCs are discouraged.

Office Hours

PoCs will host group office hours every two weeks once the program begins. These sessions are a space to ask questions, discuss ideas, and collaborate live.

How to get support

- Use the Slack channel as your first point of contact (if you are not yet in the Slack channel, then email your PoC at mazumder_lab AT gwu.edu)

- Follow up with your PoCs in the group channel

- Come prepared with questions for office hours

- Participate in discussions and support your peers

Our goal is to create an open, collaborative environment where everyone can learn and contribute.

Potential Projects

We are excited to continue our bioinformatics volunteership program in Summer 2026. This program offers students the opportunity to work on bioinformatics projects supported by agencies such as the NIH, ARPA-H, and FDA. Participants will gain exposure to a variety of activities within a bioinformatics lab, including data analysis, computational biology, and genomics. If you are interested, please email mazumder_lab@gwu.edu your resume and a ranked list of the projects that interest you most. You can also indicate if you want to focus on specific areas that are of interest to you.

  1. BiomarkerKB (biomarkerkb.org) project: Biomarker curation project. Involves reading papers and collecting biomarkers.
  2. GlyGen (glygen.org) project: Review glycomics and glycoproteomics data and curate tissue, disease, and other related information.
  3. ARGOS (argosdb.org) project: Analyze genomics data using HIVE to identify reference genome assemblies.
  4. PredictMod (hivelab.biochemistry.gwu.edu/predictmod) project. Curating PMIDs for intervention outcome prediction dataset LLM recommendation training.

Note: Individuals involved in the above projects with a background in programming and/or machine learning may also undertake additional tasks to support the development of ML models, which can be integrated into PredictMod or used to enhance AI/ML-ready datasets within GlyGen. We are also looking for individuals who have previously worked with us to take on a coordinator role.

1. BiomarkerKB Biocuration Project

POC: Jeet Vora (primary), Maria Kim, Cyrus Au-Yeung

BiomarkerKB is a biomedical knowledgebase project focused on harmonizing and structuring biomarker knowledge from scientific literature and public resources. We are currently recruiting individuals with experience working with LLMs (e.g. Claude, ChatGPT) to support the following tasks:

  1. Validation of existing published biomarkers from scientific literature (JV, MK, CA)
    • Review and validate previously reported biomarkers by checking the original literature, confirming evidence support, and standardizing biomarker annotations
    • Assess the evidence strength of biomarkers and identify additional literature to strengthen the support for biomarker claims
  2. Curation of novel biomarkers from scientific literature (MK)
    • Curate high-quality biomarkers for a selected disease area, organize the findings into a structured dataset
    • Standardize biomarker representations using controlled vocabularies and ontologies and classify biomarkers by their biomarker types
    • Construct and test-query a disease-specific biomarker knowledge graph (optional)
  3. Electronic Health Records Normal Entity Data Integration (JV)
    • Identify relevant EHR data elements (lab tests, diagnoses, procedures)
    • Map entities to standard terminologies (e.g., SNOMED CT, LOINC, ICD codes)
    • Resolve ambiguities and inconsistencies in mapping, clinical terminology
  4. Front-end testing for BiomarkerKB.org (MK, JV)
    • Test the BiomarkerKB web interface for functionality and data presentation, and document issues / improvement suggestions for the development team
  5. Benchmarking and LLM-based biomarker extraction (optional*) (CA)
    • Construct manually curated biomarker reference sets in the glycobiology domain to support benchmarking of LLM-based knowledge extraction pipelines.
    • Apply an LLM workflow to extract disease-specific biomarkers from literature and comparing model outputs against the manually curated benchmark sets

Note: Participation in the benchmarking and LLM-based biomarker extraction subproject depends on sufficient progress in either task 1 or task 2. Volunteers are expected to first complete either validation of an LLM-extracted glycobiology subset or comprehensive curation of a disease-specific biomarker set before beginning this component. Because this volunteership is structured around a 20-hour-per-week commitment, participation in this part is not guaranteed.

Individuals interested in this opportunity may reach out to Jeet Vora (jeetvora@gwu.edu) for project details.

2. GlycoSiteMiner Curation Project

POC: Kate Warner

GlycoSiteMiner (PMID: 40401984) is a large language model (LLM)-based tool developed by the GlyGen team to automate a literature-mining pipeline that extracts experimentally validated, protein sequence–specific glycosylation sites from PubMed abstracts. By leveraging natural language processing, GlycoSiteMiner accelerates the identification of glycosylation evidence that would otherwise require extensive manual review.

The objective of this project is to validate these text-mined entries and curate them into structured datasets using GlyTableMaker (https://glygen.ccrc.uga.edu/tablemaker), a companion tool designed to support the deposition of glycans and glycoproteins, assignment of standardized metadata, and generation of high-quality Excel/CSV tables. This process ensures that extracted information is accurate, consistent, and suitable for integration into GlyGen’s knowledgebase.

This opportunity provides hands-on experience in biocuration workflows, including data validation, standardization, and quality control. Participants will deepen their understanding of glycobiology concepts, gain practical experience working with biological databases, and develop skills in evaluating and refining LLM-generated outputs for scientific applications.

3. GlyGen Biocuration Project

POC: Rene Ranzinger and Urnisha Bhuiyan

Over the last three decades, numerous glycomics database projects have been initiated to collect valuable information about glycans, proteins, and their interactions. Some of these databases have been discontinued due to the end of project funding; however, the data contained within them remains highly valuable to the research community. Integrating these legacy datasets into modern databases or knowledgebases, such as GlyGen, presents a significant challenge because much of the associated metadata (e.g., species, tissue, disease, cell line) is recorded as free-text that does not conform to the standardized dictionaries and ontologies used by current resources.

To address this challenge, this project will leverage large language models (LLMs) to automate the mapping of free-text metadata from legacy databases, specifically CarbBank and CFG, to standardized accessions in authoritative resources such as NCBI Taxonomy, Disease Ontology, and Cellosaurus. The LLM-based workflow will identify and normalize synonyms, abbreviations, and spelling variants (e.g., “human,” “man,” or “h. sapiens” mapped to Homo sapiens), enabling scalable and reproducible metadata harmonization that would otherwise require extensive manual curation. The LLM tasks will be performed using OpenAI resources integrated into the GlyGen curation pipeline. The project involves the development of Python scripts to read and write data, invoke the OpenAI API and compare results with manual curated data. Another aspect of the work is the development and finetunning of a prompt for ChatGPT to ensure reliable and accurate mapping is produced.

While the mapping process will be largely automated, manual validation will be incorporated as a quality-control step to assess model performance, verify correctness, and identify edge cases requiring refinement. This hybrid approach significantly reduces curator burden while ensuring high-quality, ontology-aligned annotations.

The goal of this effort is to migrate and modernize datasets from CarbBank and CFG, making them interoperable with GlyGen and other contemporary glycoinformatics resources through a scalable, AI-assisted curation strategy.

Two projects:

  1. Taking predicted sites and curating them using table maker
  2. Website testing (all volunteers)

For any questions, please contact Rene Ranzinger (rene@ccrc.uga.edu) or Kate Warner (k.warner1@email.gwu.edu).

4. GlyGen Publication Analysis Project

POC: Rene Ranzinger and Urnisha Bhuiyan

One of the challenges for any bioinformatics project is understanding the size of its community, how well the project serves this community, and how widely its software/database is used. A potential solution is to analyze PubMed publication data. We are seeking applicants with programming skills (in Python or Java) to perform this analysis.

The project involves:

  1. Using the PubMed web API to filter publications based on keywords.
  2. Analyzing paper abstracts to identify research institutions and groups that form the community.
  3. Filtering the community list to exclude unrelated co-authors

A subproject will involve analyzing the full text of papers (when available) for keywords or resource and database names. The results of the analysis will be discussed with GlyGen project member who will suggest changes and improvements to the analysis and data presentation. Source code developed as part of this project will be documented and shared in a public GitHub repository. If you have any other ideas or methods you would like to explore, please reach out to rene@ccrc.uga.edu to discuss them.

5. PredictMod Machine Learning (ML) Modeling Project

POC: Lori Krammer, Pat McNeely

Volunteers will conduct ML modeling using publicly-available -omics datasets that were previously identified (see our Recommended Publications for IOPMs page). This volunteership will involve data harmonization, model training, and pipeline documentation.

Tasks associated with this project include:

  1. Exploring and understanding the data found in relevant PMIDs that can be used to train intervention outcome prediction models.
  2. Preparing the data for model training and model performance evaluation
  3. Testing the modeling tutorial, PredictMod platform, and associated project tools
  4. Documentation of the ML pipeline and testing results

Deliverables for this project include:

  1. ML-ready datasets & trained model scripts pushed to GitHub
  2. Pipeline documentation captured in BioCompute Objects (BCOs) and testing reports
  3. Volunteership documentation (final report, progress updates, symposium presentation)

Interested individuals should reach out to lorikrammer@gwu.edu. Please note that this project requires attendance at biweekly meetings and a final presentation of your work.

6. BioCompute Objects User Research Project

POC: Lori Krammer, Pat McNeely

Volunteers will conduct individual audits and user researcher to improve the human readability of BioCompute Objects (BCOs) and the project documentation. This volunteership will involve user research, prototyping, and documentation.

Tasks associated with the project include:

  1. Reviewing existing documentation to gain a comprehensive understanding of BioCompute Objects, their relevance to bioinformatics, and key user personas. The volunteer will identify and report gaps in the current documentation.
  2. Conducting user research to understand pain points and desired outcomes. The volunteer will develop user stories based on interviews with BCO users.
  3. Prototyping improvements to the BCO documentation and/or portal based on user stories. This could involve visual diagrams, wiki restructuring, or decision logs.

Deliverables will include:

  1. User research report with user story maps
  2. BCO documentation improvement plan
  3. Volunteership documentation (final report, progress updates, symposium presentation)

Interested individuals should reach out to lorikrammer@gwu.edu. Please note that this project requires attendance at biweekly meetings and a final presentation of your work.

7. FDA-ARGOS Computation and Pathogen Curation Project

This volunteership is currently paused.

Requirements for Completion

Note: The following are mandatory. Failure to complete any will result in an incomplete volunteer record.

Documentation

All volunteers must maintain adequate documentation of their work, including written protocols and scripts submitted to GitHub.

Written Report

Submit a 1–2 page summary of your tasks and accomplishments to the Admin during the final week of your program.

Presentation & Slide Submission

Present your work last week of the 9-week period.

Slides must be submitted to the POCs.

Completion Certificate

A certificate of completion and a letter of recommendation will be provided to all participants who successfully complete the program. Additional recognition will be given to the top three volunteers with exceptional presentations at the end of the program.

Contact

mazumder_lab@gwu.edu.

Volunteers (TBD)

Name Project Assigned POC Assigned Projects Interested
Sahana Adusumilli BiomarkerKB Jeet Vora Review EHR Normal Ranges
Abhirama Chillara BiomarkerKB Jeet Vora/Maria TBD
Rhea Charles PredictMod Lori Krammer PredictMod ML

*Returning volunteer.

**Not directly involved in the semester curriculum; long-term volunteer.

Summer 2026 Symposium

The Summer symposium will be held virtually.

Date: TBD

Time: 4 - 6 PM

Zoom Link - TBA

Agenda (All times are in Eastern Standard Time)

Time Project Presentation Title Presenter(s)
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