CoDEx Poster Winner Awarded Travel to Greece for Research Conference

When researchers descended on one of the oldest cities in the world—Athens, Greece—to attend the World Conference on Research Integrity in June, collaborative and lively discussions about research integrity took center stage.  

One of those researchers, Reese Richardson, a PhD student in Interdisciplinary Biological Sciences in the Judd A. and Marjorie Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, was able to attend the conference thanks, in large part, to an award he won from the Computation and Data Exchange (CoDEx) research symposium held in April. 

CoDEx is an all-day event designed to showcase computation and data-enabled research at Northwestern, strengthen the computational research community, and build awareness of the services and support offered by Northwestern IT's Research and Computing Data Services (RCDS) team. It is hosted by Northwestern Information Technology and sponsored by the Office of the Provost. 

Richardson, whose research centers around research integrity, won the CoDEx poster session for his presentation, “Understudied Genes Are Lost in a Leaky Pipeline Between Genome-Wide Assays and Reporting of Results.” His first-place win awarded him the opportunity to attend his choice of a research-related conference with airfare, travel, and related expenses up to $3,000 covered.  

The first-place winning poster promotes the investigation of understudied genes and creates a data-driven tool, Find My Understudied Genes (FMUG), that helps biomedical researchers identify understudied genes and characterize their tractability for future research. Additional authors of this research include Heliodoro Tejedor Navarro, Luis AN Amaral, and Thomas Stoeger. 

“CoDEx is a fantastic time. It’s very interdisciplinary so you can learn a lot from people both in and out of your field,”  said Richardson.

Having only traveled internationally once before, Richardson jumped at the opportunity to make the most of his CoDEx award. While at the conference, he forged new connections with colleagues in his field, engaged in interdisciplinary conversations about research integrity, and enjoyed some sightseeing.  

Prior to attending CoDEx, Richardson leveraged support resources provided through RCDS to aid, accelerate, and advance his research. He regularly uses Quest, FSMResFiles, and OneDrive. He has also attended Globus and Python workshops, which are a few among the many workshops offered by RCDS throughout the year.  

He said he came to Northwestern for his PhD because he knew he would have access to a host of wonderful research resources here that he wouldn’t get elsewhere. When asked about the impact of these tools, services, and workshops on his research, Richardson said, “It makes everything faster. Having access to high-performance computing environments means you can scale up research quickly. RCDS can also help you make your workflow more efficient or acquire new skills you didn’t have before.”  

He closed with the following endorsement, “To anyone who hasn’t leveraged Northwestern Information Technology’s Research Computing and Data Services, you don’t know what you’re missing.”