Jason Viet Vu comes to the St. Jude Graduate School from the West Coast, where he earned a degree in biomolecular engineering and bioinformatics from the University of California, Santa Cruz.
This will not be Vu’s first experience with St. Jude, as he participated in the prestigious National Symposium for Predoctoral Research (NSPR) in 2025, which is hosted by the St. Jude Graduate School. He has also made a number of poster and oral presentations, including in 2025 at the Annual Biomedical Research Conference for Minoritized Sciences (ABRCMS) and the Population, Evolutionary and Quantitative Genetics (PEQG) Conference in 2026.
The San Jose, Calif., native is passionate about integrating genetics and biomedical data to better understand understudied disorders and vulnerable populations. His previous work focuses on identifying the distribution of genetic variants that can affect vulnerable pediatric populations’ medication intake.
Vu joins the Applied Biomedical Data Sciences program at the St. Jude Graduate School with a drive to draw from the resources and collective knowledge of the St. Jude's research community to supercharge his technical expertise in applying data science to improve pediatric health outcomes. The opportunity to learn from the best in the field that St. Jude provides allows him to gain invaluable experience for the future of his journey as a data scientist.
Hometown: San Jose, CA
Education:
2026 BS, Biomolecular Engineering and Bioinformatics – University of California, Santa Cruz
Awards/Honors/Scholarships:
2025-26 Koret Research Award Scholarship, Koret Foundation
2024-26 Research Mentorship Internship (RMI) Fellowship, UC Santa Cruz