Four minority college students who participated in last summer's Gateways to the Laboratory program sponsored by the Tri-Institutional MD-PhD Program were among the recipients of the Best Student Poster Awards presented at the national conference of the Society for Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science (SACNAS) held in Atlanta in October. Our Gateways students received four of the 26 awards presented at the conference, which received more than 315 poster submissions. Each award included a $200 prize.
Congratulations go to the following Gateways students and their faculty and student mentors:
Ijeoma Ejigiri: "EF-2 a Potential Factor to Increase SRP-Ribosome Affinity" (faculty sponsor Gunther Blobel; student mentor Dara Raspberry).
Nonyerem Nwaneri: "Antigen-Specific T-Cell Activation Can Trigger an Innate Immune Response" (faculty sponsor Gilla Kaplan; student mentor Gabriel Ortiz).
Fatima Soliman: "Do Posture and Imaging Procedures Affect Cognitive Measurements?" (faculty sponsor Michael Posner; student mentor Jennifer Nunez).
Efran Talamantes: "Effects of Thyroid Hormone Receptor (TR) Deletion on Estrogen Regulated Behavior in Mice" (faculty sponsor Donald Pfaff; student mentor Jose Trevejo).
Congratulations also to Gateways 2000 student Alissa Brown, who won a separate award from the Endocrine Society for genetic research on diabetes (faculty sponsor Markus Stoffel; student mentor Leslie Castelo).
In addition to the Gateways to the Laboratory Program sponsored by the Tri-Institutional MD-PhD Program, Weill Cornell sponsors two other summer enrichment programs for underrepresented minority college students: the Travelers Summer Research Fellowship Program sponsored by Weill Medical College and the Avon Foundation Summer Research Program sponsored by Weill Graduate School of Medical Sciences.