Each year, the VCU Graduate School acknowledges outstanding doctoral dissertations and master’s thesis in four broad academic categories: Life Sciences; Social Sciences, Business and Education; Math, Physical Sciences and Engineering; and Humanities and Fine Art. This year, Mariam Topchyan was honored with the 2024-2025 Outstanding Thesis Award in the Life Sciences category. She received a certificate of recognition along with a financial award.

Topchyan conducted her research in the lab of Bret Boyd, Ph.D., assistant professor in the School of Life Sciences and Sustainability. A spring 2025 VCU graduate with a Master’s of Science in Bioinformatics, she completed two research projects as part of her thesis work. The subject of her first project was investigating scientific methods in creating an updated phylogenomic tree – a visual representation of how different species have diverged from a common ancestor – that included 108 different species of doves. She focused on the impact of handling nucleotide variations within the samples' DNA on the resulting tree inference. 

For her second research project, Topchyan assembled the whole sets of DNA sequences, or genomes, of symbiotic bacteria that live in lice, specifically lice that are hosted by and found on doves. Through reference-guided assembly, she utilized a reference genome as a guide to create a new genome assembly from many short DNA sequences.  

Topchyan studied both biology and computer science separately for her undergraduate studies, and enjoyed combining both subjects through bioinformatics research. “Working on these research projects has taught me a lot about how to effectively manage large biological datasets and draw insights from them with the help of programming, as well as the challenges and trade-offs faced when assembling genomes,” she says. “Dr. Boyd has been a fantastic mentor, and I've really enjoyed working on these projects over the past two years. I'm very excited to see where the research will go from here.”

Topchyan’s thesis abstracts and dissertation can be found in VCU Scholars Compass.