On July 19, Dalia Ghoneim earned her Ph.D. for successfully defending her thesis, "New functions for RNA elucidated by evolutionary conservation." She demonstrated that adjacent pairs of codons known to inhibit protein expression and to slow translation in yeast are conserved, rather than avoided. Genes with these conserved codon pairs exhibit altered translation properties. Thus, conservation is evidence that these codon pairs serve a function in yeast, although that function is yet to be determined. Additionally, in collaboration with Xin Li's lab, Dalia scanned mouse sperm transcriptome data using a machine learning method to identify sets of long-non-coding RNAs with conserved structures. Dalia was mentored by David H. Mathews and Beth Grayhack. During her studies, Dalia was awarded the prestigious Perricone MD Born Seekers fellowship. We wish Dalia all the best for her post-doctoral career!