The 22nd Annual Graduate Research Symposium

Friday, December 5th
CILSE 101, 610 Commonwealth Ave

Program

  • 8:30 am – Registration
  • 9:00 am – Opening Remarks

    • Shannon Stott, Ph.D., BME Chair
    • Darren Roblyer, Ph.D., BME Faculty
    • Kate Herrema & Maya Bartels, QBP Co-hosts
  • 9:20-10:20 am – Student Speakers
    • Aarohi Mehendale: Spatial Frequency Domain Imaging (SFDI) for assessment of skin involvement in Scleroderma
    • Dev Raj Mehrotra: Non-destructive Longitudinal Raman Spectroscopic Monitoring of Osteoarthritis Treatment Progression
    • James Robson: Deciphering Sequence-to-Function Frameworks of Programmable RNA Sensors
    • Aalanna Farrell: Investigating mechanisms of vascular toxicity by tyrosine kinase inhibitors in cancer treatment
  • 10:20-10:50 am – Coffee Break
  • 10:50-11:50 am – Student Speakers
    • Maryam Dashtiahangar: High-throughput assessment of cooperative cofactor recruitment to composite DNA elements
    • Zoe Garman: Investigating the role of relaxin-2 in uterine fibroids
    • Audrey Van Heest: Engineering Tumor Microenvironment-Responsive Biosensors for Precision Oncology
    • Jordan Smiley: Enhancing Vaccine-Induced Immunity with Self-Amplifying RNA
  • 12:00-1:00 pm – Keynote – Dr. Joe Culver, Professor of Radiology, Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology, Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine
  • 1:00-2:30 pm – Lunch and Student Posters
    • James Roberts: AI Agents for Biological Design Tools
    • Aedan Brown: Evolutionary simulations of metabolism reveal role of constant selective pressure
    • Samuel Zhou: Dopamine loss alters striatal cholinergic interneuron intracellular dynamics and movement encoding
    • Emily Davis: FAK as a central mediator of provisional matrix assembly during stromal repair
    • Sophie Zic: Building a custom system to perform sequential spatially resolved transcriptomic experiments
    • Christopher Lu: Implementing Base Editing to Correct a Pathogenic Variant of Wolfram Syndrome for Preventing Neurodegeneration
    • Katie Breuckman:
    • Rockwell Tang: Neurogenic low frequency blood flow oscillations and microcirculatory perfusion associated with stroke recovery
    • Ezra Cho: Modulating Antigen Processing through Nanoporous Cages to Bias Adaptive Immunity
    • Siyi Zheng: Harnessing DNA-based vaccines to generate lung-resident immunity