The Center for Environmental Health Sciences (CEHS) at MIT held its annual poster session on May 31 in Morss Hall in Walker Memorial. The session highlighted the work of 16 of the center's affiliated labs from nine MIT departments and featured more than 50 posters.
CEHS has as its overall mission the study of biological effects and processes of exposure to environmental agents in order to understand, and predict, how such exposures affect human health. To that end, the center brings together 27 MIT faculty members from a total of eight MIT departments (in both the School of Science and the School of Engineering) plus one faculty member from the Harvard School of Public Health.
The highlight of this year's CEHS event was the presentation of prizes to graduate students and postdoctoral scientists by Daniel Znaty, a student at MIT Sloan and a son of the late Myriam Marcelle Znaty, in whose honor an endowment was established nearly 30 years ago to support the research of young scientists at MIT. First-place awards of $500 and second-place awards of $100 were provided by the Myriam Marcelle Znaty Research Fund.
The research presentations yielded a three-way tie for the best graduate student poster. All three winners will receive the full prize amount of $500.
Alexandria Sams from Linda Griffith's lab presented her work on "Development and Characterization of an in vitro Culture System as a Physiological Model for Chronic Hepatitis B Infection."
Dominika Wiktor-Brown from Bevin Engelward's lab presented her work on "The Impact of Age, Exposure and Genetics on Homologous Recombination in vivo."
Paul Huang from Forest White's lab presented his work on "Quantitative Phosphoproteomic Analysis of EGFRvIII Cellular Signaling Pathways in Blioblastoma Multiforme."
The $100 second prize was awarded to Lauren Frick, a graduate student in John Essigmann's lab. Ms. Frick presented her work on "Alleviation of 1,N6-ethanoadenine Genotoxicity by the Escherichia Coli Adaptive Response Protein AlkB."
The third prize, which was a CEHS T-shirt, mug and lanyard was awarded to Marcos Marcos, a graduate student in Roman Stocker's lab. Marcos presented his work on "Bacteria Fighting Turbulence: A Microfluidic Study."
Winners in the postdoctoral fellows/associates category included:
First prize of $500 awarded to Michelle Williams, a postdoctoral associate in Steven Tannenbaum's lab, who presented her work on "Lipid Peroxidation of Nitrated Proteins from iNOS Induced Macrophages Using Biotin Labeling and Capture."
Second prize of $100 was awarded to Shiva Kalinga from Peter Dedon's lab. Kalinga presented his work on "Genomic Approaches to Understanding Cellular Determinants of DNA Damage."
Third prize of a CEHS T-shirt, mug and lanyard was awarded to Diana Borenshtein from David Schauer's lab. Borenshtein presented her work on "Long-term Metabolic Effects of Acute Intestinal Infection in Mice."
