Announcing the 2018 Young Scientist Seminars Winners!

iBiology and our partners the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation and the Alda Center for Communicating Science are proud to announce the four winners of the 2018 Young Scientist Seminars’ competition! The winners will attend a workshop at the iBiology headquarters at UCSF, May 29-June 1, 2018 and record their 30-minute research talks in our green screen studio. These talks will be posted on iBiology.org as part of the Young Scientist Seminars, a video series showcasing the work of young scientists.

Winners

Johana Goyes-Vallejos completed her doctoral work at the University of Connecticut where she studied parental care behavior strategies in frogs and evolution of mating systems.

Darienne Myers completed her PhD at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). There she studied how T cells signal in response to self-proteins, and how mistakes in these signals can lead to autoimmunity.

Filipa Rijo-Ferreira is searching for circadian clocks in parasites to better understand the complex daily host-pathogen interactions. She is a HHMI Associate within the laboratory of Joseph S. Takahashi at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center.

Anna Stöckl completed her doctoral studies at Lund University in Sweden, where she investigated how moths can see at night with the help of neural processing. She now continues her studies of the insect brain as a research associate at Würzburg University in Germany.

Finalists

We’d also like to recognize the six finalists of the YSS competition!

Jhon Cores is a Ph.D. candidate finishing up his degree at the University of North Carolina/North Carolina State University Joint Department of Biomedical Engineering, where he is developing a stem cell therapy for the treatment of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis.

Cornelius Taabazuing is a postdoctoral fellow at Memorial Sloan Kettering where he is focused on understanding how the immune system becomes activated.

Hanaa Hariri is a post-doctoral fellow at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, interested in understanding how the internal organization of the cell affects the efficiency of metabolic processes.

Ken Dutton-Regester is a Research Officer at the QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute exploring melanoma genetics to improve therapies for late stage disease.

Ummat Somjee is a PhD candidate in intersciplimary ecology at the University of Florida. His research aims to understand the consequences of exaggerated traits to physiology, behavior and selection in a wild insect population in the tropics.

Steven Moss is a graduate student at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) where he studies the roles of important proteins in Legionella pneumophia infections.

The Young Scientist Seminars are funded by the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation, which accelerates support for medical research through recognition of scientific excellence, public education, and advocacy. The training for the four winners is led by the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science in partnership with iBiology.