INBRE IV

The INBRE Program Meeting and Biomedical Sciences & Health Disparities Symposium held on April 21, 2023, was a great success with students expanding upon their academic activities. We had nearly 180 total attendees! A special “Thank you” to all the volunteers who contributed to the success of the program.
Students, we hope you enjoyed the experience of networking with your peers, listening to the discussion by the panel of professionals, and presenting your poster. We had many faculty comments about the impressive quality of research and the manner of professional presentation – INBRE students you did yourself proud!

The scores are in for the Top 4 INBRE Undergraduate Student Poster Presentations. These students are invited to attend and participate in the NIH IDeA Western Regional Conference in Santa Ana Pueblo, New Mexico August 2 – 4, 2023.

Here are the top 4 scores:

• Yuewen Ding, Kapiolani Community College, University of Hawaii at Manoa
  Poster Title: “Production and Characterization of Pre-Fusion Ebola Virus Gp2 Expressed in Drosphila S2 Cells for Analysis of Vaccine-Induced Immune Responses”
• Jenna Spellman (with Nikki Zamani & Samantha Teramulo), University of Hawaii Maui College
  Poster Title: “Effects of Food Preservatives on Human Recombinant Lysozyme in Turbidimetric and Fluorescent Assays”
• Emily Andrist, Hawaii Pacific University
  Poster Title: “Impact of Environmental Variability on Vibrio vulnificus“
• Finn Reil, University of Hawaii Hilo
  Poster Title: “New Syntheses and Chemistry of Diazo Compounds“

FLYER

Dates:  September 6 – November 15, 2022

Summary:  This learning research community is a 10-week series of asynchronous technical lectures and synchronous workshops to introduce health disparity researchers to data science through practical, hands-on training. Lectures will introduce fundamental principles and techniques of data science in order to extract useful information and knowledge from data. In parallel to lectures, workshop participants will also learn how to explore data, define cohorts and build participant-level datasets using the All of Us Researcher Workbench. Participants will also learn how to write reproducible and modular code with R, including programming best practices.

REGISTRATION FORM

The UHCC CREATE Summer Internship program hosted a poster presentation on Friday, July 28, 022 for the CREATE students to showcase their summer projects.  INBRE RAIN students Carper and Davis were able to participate in this program. 

Background info:  

Annie Carper (Idaho INBRE) and Aurora Davis (Virginia INBRE) both participated in the first Hawaii Idea Networks of Biomedical Research Excellence (INBRE) – Regional Alliance of INBRE Networks (RAIN) Summer Exchange Program.  The summer program is with the University of Hawai’i Cancer Center’s, Cancer Research Education, Advancement, Training and Empowerment (CREATE) Summer Internship Program.  The CREATE Program provides hands-on summer research experiences and a multi-disciplinary curriculum to undergraduate students residing in the Islands of Hawaiʻi and the Pacific to reinforce their intent to graduate with a science degree and to consider a career to address health disparities and contribute to drug discovery. 

For further information about the CREATE program, please refer to their program website: https://www.uhcancercenter.org/education/trainees/create-for-undergraduate

Photo of the UHCC Coordinator and INBRE team at the poster session:  Left to Right: Gertraud Maskarinec (CREATE Program Lead), Peter Hoffmann, Chi Ma, Christian Fernando Alonzo, Annie Carper, Aurora Davis, FuKun Hoffmann, Robert Nichols, Leighanne Felix

The Biomedical Symposium was held virtually for the first time on April 15-16, 2021.  Despite some trepidation over holding the event online, the symposium was a tremendous success, with over 200 attendees in attendance for both days.

On Day 1 Drs. Peter Hoffmann and Saguna Verma had a monumental task of organizing and hosting 127 graduate presentations, (126 presenters), which ran at 5-minute intervals in two parallel sessions.  There was an assortment of topics from SARS-Cov-2, the H.O.M.E. Project, arthroplasties, various cancers, urogenital complications, substance abuse, depression, microbiome database development, studies anthropogenic changes to the Kailua Ahupuaʻa, census data analysis, to Alzheimer’s Disease.

Keynote speaker, Dr. Barbara Slusher, Professor of Neurology, Pharmacology and Molecular Sciences, Psychiatry, Neuroscience, Medicine and Oncology at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, shared a fascinating presentation on academia’s rising contribution to pharmaceutical discoveries. Dr. Slusher is the Director of Johns Hopkins Drug Discovery and is Co-founder of the International Consortium of Academic Drug Discovery with over 150 university-led translational centers.

Day 2 was sponsored by the INBRE Program, led by by Drs. Jon-Paul Bingham and Peter Hoffmann. The morning session began with welcomes by INBRE Principal Investigator Dr. Robert Nichols, and INBRE PATHway Director Dr. Jon-Paul Bingham, followed by a Panel Discussion led by PhD and Master’s Candidates, then followed by breakout rooms for INBRE students to “Meet the Mentors” for Q&A time with INBRE faculty.

The morning session concluded with Keynote Speaker Dr. Zoe Hammatt, JD, MPhil, Adjunct Associate Professor, Department of Cell and Molecular Biology and President of Z Consulting, LLC. Dr. Hammatt’s talk on “An Introduction to Research Integrity,” covered the nuances and distinction of rules, regulations and guidelines of commonly accepted norms of research.

The afternoon session comprised of undergraduate poster presentations. There were 51 presentations (49 presenters), running at 15-minute intervals in 5 breakout rooms. Five minutes was allotted for Q&A. Research topics on Day 2 were equally diverse, examples include:

• Machine learning and metabolomics;
• Dicephalic parapagus imaging in conjoined twins;
• Native Hawaiian health;
• E-Cigarette Marketing and Use;
• Vibrio vulnificus in the Ala Wai canal;
• Trends on substance use among emerging young adults

Presentations were professionally done by all presenters. Thank you to the Biomedical Symposium Committee, INBRE judges, Moderators, and INBRE Admin Staff who helped make this symposium possible and a memorable event for all.

Symposium Slider Gallery: Click Here

Day 1 and Day 2 Keynote Speakers

(126 presenters) and Day 2 51 presentations, (49 presenters).