Student & Faculty Highlights

Co-Investigators Patricia E. Gallagher, Ph.D. and Ann Tallant, PhD and Graduate Students David R. Soto-Pantoja and Jyotsana Menon, in new animal research discovered a treatment effective in mice at blocking the growth and shrinking the size of lung cancer tumors, one of the leading causes of cancer death in the world. Read more. . . .

>> Congratulations to Akbar Salam on his tenure and promotion to Associate Professor, and receipt of the
    Ollen R. Nalley Faculty Fellowship (2009-12)
>> Congratulations to the following faculty members for new or continuing grants/awards received over the
    summer:
    • Uli Bierbach, NIH grant (1st year, $229,541), “Novel DNA-metalating hybrid anticancer agents”
    • Brad Jones, Provost’s Grant ($1000, Summer 2009), “Cutting Edge Metal Detector;”
    • Bruce King, NIH/WFU Health Sciences award ($10,000), “Proteomic profiling of cancer-related redox
       signaling pathways,” and NIH grant (1st year of 2 years, $324,069), “The Nitroxyl-nitric oxide producing
       reactions of hydroxyurea and related compounds,” and the ACS-Petroleum Research Fund ("PRF") grant
       (new 1-year award for $50,000), "Synthesis of hydroxamic acids through NOH insertion of ketones;"
    • Christa Colyer, NSF grant (2nd of 3 years, $113,000), “Affinity-based CE studies to facilitate bioprobe
       design & microbe detection;” Angela King, NSF grant (five year award to Education Department, with
       Leah McCoy, $893,753), “WINS: Wake Innovative Noyce Scholars”
    • Mark Welker, NC Biotechnology Center award ($2100), “WFU CRADLE program kick-off grants writing
       workshop”
    • Willie Hinze, NC Biotechnology Center (new 18-mo. award, $26,850), “Surfactant mediated extractive
       preconcentration of nanomaterials;”
    • Abdou Lachgar, R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. (new 1-yr. award,  $124,882), “Design and synthesis of
       metal-organic materials for selective tobacco smoke filtration and waste water purification”
    • Rebecca Alexander, NC Biotechnology Center award ($5750), “Biotechnology partners fellowship
       program,” and NSF grant ($126,398), “CAREER: Dissecting domain-domain communication in
       methionyl-tRNA synthetase”
>> Several chemistry faculty members have been selected to participate in special training opportunities during
    the 2009/10 academic year at WFU, including  Lindsay Comstock and Patricia Dos Santos for the “Cradle II
    Initiative;” Rebecca Alexander for the “Women's Health Center of Excellence for Research, Leadership,
    Education (WHCoE) Leadership & Mentoring Program;” and Christa Colyer for the WFU Leadership Development
    Program.

Robert Gould
Rob has won the Graduate Student Poster competition for the Behavioral Pharmacology division of the American Society for Pharmacotherapy and Experimental Therapeutics (ASPET) meeting.

Yuval Silberman
Yuval won the Best Student Basic Science Poster Presentation at the Research Society on Alcoholism Annual Meeting this past June (06/2009).

Julie Steen | Biomedical Engineering
Posted 9.3.09

Julie Steen, a Graduate Student in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, was recently (01-Sep-20009 start date) awarded a Ruth L. Kirschstein National Service Award (NRSA) for a project titled “Effect of Hypoxia and Mechanical Loading on Native Human Meniscus” by the National Institutes of Health/National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases.

FASEB Welcomes New President, Mark O. Lively, PhD
Posted 9.3.09

Bethesda, MD – Mark O. Lively, Ph.D. assumed office as the 94th president of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) on July 1, 2009. Lively is a professor of biochemistry at Wake Forest University, as well as the Director of the Molecular Genetics Program and Director of the Biomolecular Resource Laboratory. He will serve for one year as the leader of FASEB, a coalition of 22 member societies comprising more than 90,000 biomedical research scientists....more

Jennie Biser, a current Master Teacher Fellows student in the Education Department, was named as one of three recipients of the North Carolina Council of Social Studies student teacher scholarship, a statewide competition in which a committee chooses outstanding student teachers. For the competition, she had to write an essay on teaching social studies in North Carolina. Congratulations Jennie!

Andrew Burke, a student in Cancer Biology, and Leo Ding, a student in the Departments of Physics and Radiation Oncology, recently had their joint work ("Long-term survival following a single treatment of kidney tumors with multiwalled carbon nanotubes and near-infrared radiation") published in the PNAS August 4, 2009 vol. 106, no. 31 12897-12902. Other authors on this paper include Cancer Biology Postdoctoral Research Fellows Dr. Heather Hatcher and Dr. Ravi Singh, also in the Torti lab group.  This collaborative work involves using multiwalled carbon nanotubes and near-infrared radiation to successfully treat kidney tumors in an animal model. 

Lawrence received a travel award for $1,000 from the International Cannabinoid Research Society, ICRS, to attend and present a poster July 2009 at their international conference in Chicago, IL. He also received a predoctoral presenter's award.

Xuanfeng (research advisor Dr. Dan Bourland) whose research on Magnetic Resonance Temperature Imaging guided thermal therapy using Carbon Nanotubes was selected as an Oral Presentation from thousands of abstracts which were submitted to 51st AAPM (American Association of Physicist in Medicine) annual Meeting this year. The conference which will be held in July 26-29, Anaheim Convention Center, CA, is the international meeting for the whole Medical Physicists Society. Xuanfeng is going to present his work on July 29 in the Session: Innovations and Frontiers in Medical Physics. The criteria are based on Scientific rigor, Potential significance, Interest to the medical physics and Innovation. Please visit the following links for additional information:
http://www.aapm.org/meetings/amos2/pdf/42-11144-19076-787.pdf (abstract)
http://www.aapm.org/meetings/09AM/  

Dr. Stephen Whittington, Adjunct Associate Professor of the Department of Anthropology, and Current Director of the Meusum of Anthropology, was awarded the Less Commonly Taught Languages Scholarship by San Diego State University to attend the Mixtec Program in Oaxaca, Mexico this summer, where he is learning the Mixtec language to further his research. Read more...

Eric Peterson, a graduate student working with Professor David Carroll, has been awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. See website for more information - http://www.wfu.edu/academics/physics/news/20/08f-09s/peterson/fellowship.html

David Miller, MD – Received a Master Teacher Award from the Internal Medicine Residency Program, June 2009 (WFUSM)

Rajyalakshmi Gadi, MD – Awarded a fellowship grant from Genzyme for her proposed work on “Vitamin D and Myocardial Infarction” starting June 2009 for her 2nd year of Nephrology fellowship (Kansas University Medical Center).

Aaron Corcoran came to the Biology Department with a Master’s Degree from Humbolt State University in northern California. His Master’s work involved an ambitious project in which he and his mentor Joe Szewczak developed voice recognition software that can distinguish among the many bat species that inhabit the U.S. east coast based on their echolocation cries. He arrived early in the summer of 2008, before his official matriculation in our graduate school, and immediately started work on an NSF-funded project in the laboratory of Dr. Bill Conner. He collected big brown bats from a local football stadium and began to study insects that make sounds in response to bat echolocation cries. He quickly focused on a tiger moth from Arizona that makes intense, high frequency clicks in answer to the sonar cries of a bat intent on eating it. Using high speed 3D infrared videography and high frequency sound analysis Aaron was able to gather data supporting a novel idea – that this tiger moth can jam the sonar of the bat much as a fighter jet jams anti-aircraft radar. Aaron’s progress was extraordinary, and his ideas and results have been well received. In his first year his work has been highlighted in Science News and on the Discovery Channel Canada. His very first paper was accepted by Science magazine – an amazing feat – and will come out very soon. This summer he will travel to the Southwest Research Station near Portal, Arizona, where he plans to use thermal cameras to capture the sonar jamming moth as it interacts with bats in the field.

Dr. Bill Conner, Advisor, Professor of Biology

Sarah Ryan, PhD student in Cancer Biology, received a travel award from AFLAC and AACR to attend the AACR Annual Meeting held in April 2009, Denver, CO. In addition to the travel award Sarah was selected to present a minisymposium oral presentation at the meeting.

Julia Barb was awarded the Bashir El-Beshti Prize in Renaissance Studies by the English Department for her thesis entitled "Flowers for the Book-binder's Wife: Florilegia and Early Modern Women's Writing."

Student Award | Physiology and Pharmacology
Posted 7.14.09

David Burmeister, a PhD student in Physiology and Pharmacology, received 2nd place in the ASPET Division for Systems and Integrative Pharmacology Division Best Abstract Award in April 2009.

Please visit the following website for additional news and photos - http://www.aspet.org/public/divisions/sip/news.htm

Jennifer Jordan, a PhD student in biomedical engineering, has received a 2009 Predoctoral Fellowship from the American Heart Association. The Mid-Atlantic Affiliate Research Committee reviewed 129 applications and awarded 24 applicants the two year fellowship. The fellowship will sponsor research investigating the use of cardiac MRI for early detection of heart damage in cancer patients receiving chemotherapy. 

Fumi Katsuki, a Neurobiology & Anatomy graduate student (advisor Christos Constantinidis, PhD) was awarded a Scholarship to attend the 2009 Marine Biological Laboratory summer course in Neuroinformatics, which will be held between August 15 - 30 in Woods Hole, MA. The course is attended by senior graduate students and postdocs from around the country.

Niky Hughes, Biology PhD student (received PhD in May 2009). Traveled to New Zealand in the Spring semester on a Richter fellowship, to study why some leaves have red margins. There is currently no functional explanation for leaf margin coloration, and I tested the hypothesis that the red coloration acts as a visual signal to insects of increased phenolic defenses concentrated in the leaf margins (to deter the insects from eating leaves). The hypothesis was not supported, but the trip was probably the best experience of my life. I visited glow worm caves, hiked in the Southern Alps, absailed, and ventured to the center of an active volcano (and that's just a sampling of my experiences). It was awesome.

Ranjan Banerjee (advisor Dr. S. Bruce King) presented a poster titled "New Synthetic Approaches Towards The Natural Hydroxamic Acid Cobactin Core," at the 41st National Organic Symposium, June 7-11, 2009 in Boulder, CO. This conference is the national meeting of the organic chemistry division of the American Chemical Society.

Smitha Raghunathan, a Biomedical Engineering graduate student in the VT-WFU School of Biomedical Engineering and Sciences, has won the Dr. Margaret H. Hines Award for Best Oral Presentation at the 5th Annual Injury Biomechanics Symposium at The Ohio State University. The conference was held in Columbus Ohio on May 18th and 19th. Winners were selected by a combined evaluation by Symposium audience and Symposium Technical Committee. Criteria for this award included relevance of the work, importance of the work, quality of the technical effort, and contribution to the study by the student; a written paper and oral presentation were required. Smitha works in the VT-WFU Center for Injury Biomechanics, and Dr. Jessica Sparks serves as her major advisor.

John Graef, a doctoral student in the Neuroscience graduate program (advisor: Dr. Dwayne Godwin), has been selected to attend the 59th Lindau Meeting of Nobel Laureates and Students in Lindau, Germany. Since 1951, Nobel Laureates in chemistry, physics, and physiology/medicine convene annually in Lindau, Germany, to have open and informal meetings with students and young researchers. The meeting will be held from June 28-July 3, 2009, and will feature lectures by the Laureates as well as small group discussions between the Laureates and the students. John was nominated by President Hatch after an internal competition and then selected by the Oak Ridge Associated Universities (ORAU) for sponsorship. Only 60 students across the country were chosen to participate last year and a similar number are expected for 2009. Wake Forest is fortunate to have graduate students of such caliber.