2009 Research Highlights

Samuel I. Ares, a student in industrial biotechnology and chemical engineering at University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez

Studied the functional role of IGF2BP2 and HMGA2 in adipocyte tissue and Type 2 Diabetes.

Christel Chehoud, a computational biology junior at Princeton University

Resolved conflicts between phylogenetic groupings and existing taxonomic nomenclature to improve classification accuracy of genetic sequences in the order of bacteria known as Clostridiales.

Eric Delgado, an economics and biology freshman at Yale

Explored the effect that ploidy – the number of sets of chromosomes in a cell -- has on the genetic analysis of yeasts.

Kunle Demuren, a junior majoring in molecular biology at Princeton University

Worked on a method that utilizes comparative genomics to help predict functional relationships between genes in Mycobacterium tuberculosis and related organisms.

Peter Cruz-Gordillo, a neuroscience and biochemistry junior at Duke University

Utilized HDACi to induce expression of drug metabolizing enzyme genes in liver cell lines with the goal of creating a more efficient and cost-effective human liver model for drug toxicity screening.

Seanna Pieper Jordan, a sophomore at Yale University who is majoring in biology and ethnicity, race, and migration

Discovered a common scaffold that recognizes Npas4, a regulator of inhibitory synapses development.

Michael Melgar, a senior at MIT majoring in physics

Developed statistical methods to filter out false positive SNPs from calls made by high-throughput sequencers for the 1000 Genomes Project.

Amalchi Castillo Rodriguez, a fourth-year student in chemical engineering at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez

Explored the NF-kB pathway.

Kristin Rose, a senior majoring in biology at MIT

Found evidence to suggest that microtubule inhibitors have effects on cancer cells beyond simply inhibiting structural elements; in fact, these commonly used chemotherapy drugs seemed to alter aspects of energy metabolism.