PhD student Achyudhan Kutuva received an award to attend the Systems Approaches to Cancer Biology (SACB) Conference. This conference, which took place at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus on Feb. 9-12, brought together scientific leaders and up-and-coming investigators in cancer systems biology.

This was Kutuva’s first major conference. The first-year student in the Joint Carnegie Mellon-University of Pittsburgh PhD Program in Computational Biology (CPCB) attended a series of lightning talks, poster sessions and networking events during his stay in Colorado. 

“I’ve seen a lot of the faculty who presented there on paper by reading their journal articles but getting to meet them and network with other graduate students and postdocs from various institutions around the United States was a really cool experience,” he said. 

Kutuva has previous experience in mathematical oncology and systems biology as a summer intern at the Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Florida and as a student researcher as an undergraduate student at the University of Florida. During his PhD, he hopes to bridge mechanistic modeling with machine learning to enhance predictive accuracy while maintaining biological interpretability within oncology and immunology. Kutuva works in the labs of both Associate Professor Jim Faeder and Assistant Professor William Hawse. 

While attending SACB, he enjoyed learning more about cancer systems biology through a series of presentations. The talks that left the biggest impression on him were about the role of the tumor microenvironment, targeting signal transduction pathways, and health equity for AI. 

Kutuva applied for this SACB Scholar Award after seeing Pitt Assistant Professor Rachel Gottschalk’s name on the list of invited presenters. His advice to other students who are thinking about applying for an award is to go ahead and write the application essay if the conference sparks their interest. “If you never apply, you’ll never know what will happen,” he said. “Don’t underestimate your skill set.” 

Now that Kutuva has experienced his first big conference, he plans on giving back to the scientific community as a volunteer events supervisor at the Pennsylvania Science Olympiad on April 26. He participated in the Florida Science Olympiad as a high school student and later became the president of the University of Florida Science Olympiad. 

“I’ve always been fascinated by math and science concepts,” Kutuva said. “The CPCB program has been cool because I’ve gotten to take a lot of diverse courses and learn about all of the interesting research that has been done in these different areas within computational biology.”