News Release

Genetics Society of America announces award recipients at 51st Annual Drosophila Conference

Grant and Award Announcement

Genetics Society of America

Bethesda, MD – The Genetics Society of America is pleased to announce that nine students' research work was selected for poster awards at the 51st Annual Drosophila Research Conference in Washington, D.C., April 7-11, 2010. Students were selected for first, second and third place awards for each of three academic levels: postdoctoral, graduate and undergraduate. This was the first time that undergraduate student research was included for review to receive poster awards. In recognition of their outstanding posters, all recipients of place awards received a monetary allocation.

In addition, three students at each academic level received honorable mentions for their posters. All student winners are listed below.

Postdoctoral Fellow Posters

First: Jeremiah J. Zartman, Princeton Univ, NJ, "Negative feedback bends the gene expression boundary in a developing tissue" (666C). Principal Investigator (PI): Stanislav Shvartsman.

Second: Hiroshi Ishimoto, Univ of Iowa, Iowa City, "Non-genomic actions of the steroid hormone ecdysone in adult Drosophila" (594C). PI: Toshihiro Kitamoto.

Third: Jianhua Huang, Univ of Maryland, College Park, "TGF-β Signaling Regulates Drosophila Metamorphosis by Activating Expression of JHAMT, a Key Regulatory Enzyme of Juvenile Hormone Biosynthesis" (704B). PI: Jian Wang.

Graduate Student Posters

First: W. Ryan Williamson and Dong Wang, Univ of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, "A dual function of the v-ATPase reveals a neuron-specific degradation pathway in Drosophila" (191B). PI: P. Robin Hiesinger.

Second: Vafa Bayat, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX, "Mutations in the Mitochondrial Methionyl-tRNA Synthetase Cause Neurodegeneration in Drosophila and Humans" (386B).

Third: Andrew D. Skora, Carnegie Institution of Science, Baltimore, MD, "Epigenetic Stability Increases in the Drosophila Follicle Stem Cell lineage" (760A). PI: Allan Spradling. Skora just received his Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University and is now a postdoc researcher.

Undergraduate Student Posters

First: Cloyce E. Nelson, Univ of New Mexico, Albuquerque, "Deciphering cis-regulation in different adult muscle" (741C). PI: Richard Cripps.

Second: Cassandra Amesoli, New Mexico State Univ, Las Cruces, "Identifying Rap1 Interacting Genes in Drosophila Eye Development" (157A).

Third: Alexander M. Tseng, University of Washington, Seattle, "Dac and DII interact with each other in leg to wing transdetermination" (536B)

Honorable Mentions

Postdoctoral :

  • Ioannis Eleftherianos, Institute Biol Molec et Cellulaire, Strasbourg, France (562A)
  • Karen Beckett, National Institute for Medical Research, London, United Kingdom (240C)
  • Patrick M. Ferree, Cornell Univ, Ithaca, NY (291C)

Graduate Students:

  • Matt Sieber, Univ of Utah, Salt Lake City (698B)
  • Soumya Banerjee, Miami Univ, Oxford, OH (628A)
  • Ryan M. Baxley, Univ of Iowa, Iowa City, (516C)

Undergraduate Students:

  • Alicia R. Martin, Univ of Washington, Seattle (384C)
  • Embriette Hyde, Grand Valley State Univ, Allendale, MI (600C)
  • Vishal K. Patel, Boston Univ, MA (273C)

The poster abstract of each award recipient can be found at www.drosophila-conf.org/2010/abstracts/search.html. Search by abstract number located in parentheses above.

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ABOUT THE GENETICS SOCIETY OF AMERICA

Founded in 1931, the Genetics Society of America represents nearly 4,000 geneticists and science educators whose work with model organisms – Drosophila, C. elegans, Chlamydomonas, yeast, fungi and others – provide the basic foundations for genetic research and study. Through model organism meetings, such as the annual Drosophila Research Conference and the biennial Fungal Genetics, Yeast Genetics and Molecular Biology, International C. elegans, and Model Organisms and Human Biology conferences and meetings and its GENETICS Journal, the Society fosters collaboration and cooperation among model organism researchers and educators. For more information about the Society and these meetings, please visit www.genetics-gsa.org.


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