Biology Faculty & Student News April 2018

A special congratulations to current undergraduate Sophie Jurgensen and alumna Aidan McKenzie (currently at UW-Madison) for receiving National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships!

Congratulations to the following Biology faculty members and students:

• Dr. Chris Berndsen (Chemistry) and Dr. Ray Enke just published a paper with research students Reaffa Hossain (1st author) andNick Dunham in the journal Molecular Vision titled, "In silico modeling of epigenetic-induced changes in photoreceptor cis-regulatory elements."
• Isabel Lamb-Echegaray (student of Dr. Mark Gabriele) won 1st place in the Award of Excellence for Undergraduate Poster Presentation at the Central Virginia Chapter of the Society for Neuroscience annual symposium, for a poster entitled, "Early patterning of an auditory input to extramodular fields in the lateral cortex of the inferior colliculus in developing mouse”.
• Zachary Casey (student of Dr. George Vidal) won 2nd place in the Award of Excellence for Undergraduate Poster Presentation at the Central Virginia Chapter of the Society for Neuroscience annual symposium, for a poster entitled, "Integrin beta 3 regulates dendritic arborization of layer II/III pyramidal neurons of cerebral cortex". Student co-authors were Logan Holley, Kate Bland, and Chris Handwerk.
• Students Rachel Barborek and Annie Lin received Honorable Mentions for the Goldwater Scholarship.
• Students Raechel Davis and Max Maza won a cash award at the American Society for Microbiology Shenandoah Student Branch meeting for their poster entitled, "Whole genome sequencing of Staphylococcus sciuri isolated from a Shenandoah Valley waterway."