Kalamazoo Community Medical and Health Sciences Research Day

Students and faculty of the Department of Biological Sciences attended the 34th Annual Kalamazoo Community Medical and Health Sciences Research Day on May 4, 2016.

The event was sponsored by WMU Homer Stryker M.D. School of Medicine and held at the Radisson Plaza hotel in downtown Kalamazoo.

Seven graduate students made presentations and two received awards out of the 174 poster presentations and 46 oral presentations. A panel of 30 judges reviewed over 230 abstract submissions and determined the awards.

Tiantian Zhang, a Ph.D. candidate who works with Dr. Karim Essani, received two awards. One of his abstracts received the Best Clinical Presentation award for "Experimental Virotherapy of Human Melanoma Tumors in Nude Mice with 15L-knock-out Tanapoxvirus" by Tiantian Zhang, Karim Essani, Yogesh Suryawanshi, Dennis Kordish, Helene Woyczesczyk, and David Jeng.

Zhang also gave a poster presentation, which received a First Place Poster award on "Tanapoxvirus Expressing Interleukin-2 Regresses Human Melanoma Tumors by a T-cell Independent Mechanism in Mice" by Tiantian Zhang, Karim Essani, Dennis Kordish, and Yogesh Suryawanshi.

Joanna Dickens, a Ph.D. candidate in biological sciences who works with Dr. Christine Byrd-Jacobs, received the Second Place Poster award for her abstract "Plasticity of Mitral Cell Dendritic Morphology in the Adult Zebrafish Olfactory Bulb Following Deafferentation" by Joanna Dickens and Christine Byrd-Jacobs.