The MBM Program held its second annual retreat September 19-20, 2019. Over the course of a day and a half, we had four plenary lectures, ten trainee lightning talks, two advisor meetings, a poster session, and a lot of engagement! Here are some highlights:
Inhyun Park, Associate Professor of Genetics and Associate Professor in the Child Study Center at Yale Stem Cell Center, gave a plenary talk on “Construction of integrated brain organoids to study neurodevelopment and related disorders.”
Our trainees each gave a short, 3-5-minute lightning presentation on their current research. We asked a few of our guests to assess these presentations — and the competition was so close, that we had to ask a couple other people to help narrow down the results. Amanda Weiss and Shannon Murphy tied for Best Lightning Talk. Brian Baculis, Mikhail Kandel, and Collin Kaufman received Honorable Mention.
We began the second day with a poster session of our trainees’ research to elaborate on their lightning talk discussions from the previous evening.
Steven Stice, Director of the Regenerative Bioscience Center and Professor, GRA Eminent Scholar at University of Georgia, gave a plenary talk on “Human pluripotent neural stem cells: a platform for complex neural assays to therapeutic exosomes.” As with our lightning talks, we asked for judges to assess the posters and Collin Kaufman received the award for Best Poster Presentation. Jorge Maldonado De-Jesus and Mikhail Kandel received Honorable Mention for their posters.
Taeghwan Hyeon, Director of the Center for Nanoparticle Research at the Institute for Basic Science (IBS) and Distinguished Professor in the School of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Seoul National University, gave a plenary talk on “What and How can ‘Nano’ do for ‘Medicine?'”
Joseph Culver, Professor of Radiology, Physics, and Biomedical Engineering at Washington University School of Medicine, wrapped up the retreat with a plenary talk on “Optics for Mapping Blushing and Glowing Brains.”
