Volunteership Fall 2026

2026 Fall Volunteer Program Details

Dates

Application Deadline

August 22th | 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

Program Dates: TBD

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

Spring 2026 Volunteership

Presentation slides from the Spring 2026 volunteership symposium are publicly available on Zenodo to highlight student research contributions from the program.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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1. Glycoscience Resource Discovery and Search Platform

POC: Rene Ranzinger

The goal of this project is to develop a production-ready search and discovery platform for glycoscience databases and software tools. The volunteer will enhance an existing prototype that provides a modern, user-friendly alternative to traditional resource catalogs. The platform will enable researchers to efficiently discover relevant databases, software tools, and analytical resources based on their scientific needs.

A major component of the project will be expanding the underlying resource catalog to include not only databases but also software tools and analysis platforms. The volunteer will improve the platform's filtering and search capabilities and investigate how LLMs can be incorporated to support natural language queries.

2. GlyGen AI-Assisted Biocuration Project: Species, Tissue, and Disease Annotation

POC: Rene Ranzinger and Urnisha Bhuiyan

The goal of this project is to improve and expand GlyGen's AI-assisted biocuration workflows for metadata normalization and ontology mapping. The volunteer will review the existing species annotation pipeline, evaluate its performance, and refine the species-specific system prompt used by the LLM. Based on lessons learned from species mapping, the project will then extend the methodology to additional biomedical concepts, particularly tissue and disease annotations.

A major focus of the project will be prompt engineering, performance evaluation, and quality assessment. The student will investigate how well the LLM can identify the correct ontology terms when presented with real-world biomedical metadata containing abbreviations, synonyms, misspellings, and incomplete descriptions.

The resulting workflows will support GlyGen's ongoing efforts to harmonize metadata from publications, databases, and legacy resources, ultimately improving data quality and interoperability across the glycoscience ecosystem.

3. GlyGen Publication Analysis Project

POC: Rene Ranzinger and Urnisha Bhuiyan

The goal of this project is to further develop and expand an existing publication analysis and visualization framework that can be used to characterize and understand scientific research communities. Rather than focusing on a single predefined research domain, the analysis framework is designed to support dynamic community discovery through keyword-based literature searches. Publications identified through these searches will then be included in downstream analyses and graphically represented in form of charts, diagrams or graphs.

The resulting analyses will help answer questions such as:

• How large is a particular research community?
• Where are its researchers geographically located?
• Which institutions and investigators are most active?
• Which organizations appear to be central contributors to the field?
• Which research groups overlap with GlyGen's current user and collaborator communities?

• Which potentially important communities or research groups are currently underrepresented in GlyGen outreach efforts?

Ultimately, the analysis may be integrated with GlyGen usage metrics, such as Google Analytics data, to identify regions and research hotspots where glycobiology research is active, but GlyGen adoption appears limited. Such information can help guide future outreach, training, and community engagement activities.

4. Glycoscience Educational Chatbot

POC: Sujeet Kulkarni

The goal of this project is to develop a beta version of the Glycoscience Educational Chatbot that can be deployed on a web server and evaluated by a pilot group of users. The student will analyze the strengths and limitations of the current alpha version and implement improvements that enhance usability, reliability, performance, and safety. Particular emphasis will be placed on improving the system's guardrails to ensure that responses remain focused on educational content, minimize hallucinations, and appropriately handle questions outside the scope of the knowledge base. The completed beta version will support formal user testing by researchers and

educators, providing valuable feedback for future development and broader deployment.

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. 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.

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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.

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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.

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Contact

mazumder_lab@gwu.edu.

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Volunteers

Name	Project Assigned	POC Assigned	Project Interested

*Returning volunteer.

^†GW Masters Degree Student

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

Summer 2026 Symposium

The Summer symposium will be held virtually. Date: TBD

Time: TBD

Zoom Link - TBA

Agenda (All times are in Eastern Standard Time)

Time	Project	Presentation Title	Presenter(s)