Netanya Keil: Our Award-winning Grad student!

Netanya Keil, Graduate Student in the Renne Lab, has been busy between 2024 and 2025 presenting her research at International and local conferences, bringing in several new awards!

As part of her dissertation, she developed SQANTI-reads, a tool for evaluating multi-sample, replicated long-read RNA sequencing experiments. She presented this work at several conferences, including the Long Read Sequencing Uppsala (LRUA) Conference (2024), where she received the Best Flash Talk Award, and the Florida Genetics Symposium (2024), where she earned the Best Graduate Student Poster Award. Since then, she has presented it as a highlight talk at the conference for Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB 2025), where she received the Best Early Career Talk Award. She was also invited by the long-read sequencing company PacBio to develop an online bioinformatics seminar on this tool.

In January 2025, she was awarded the UF Health Cancer Center Predoctoral Award for her dissertation work on cellular differentiation and alternative splicing in KSHV infected endothelial cells. She also received the Kenneth & Laura Berns Award for Excellence in Genetics, which is awarded to a graduate student in the UF Genetics and Genomics Program for a significant contribution to the scientific community. Way to go, Netanya! 

---